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Someone who attempts to reach a simple acoustical nirvana through whatever form of music or set of equipment that allows you to reach that nirvana.
Is it how much you spend or how you spend it? Is it how you organize your priorities when it comes to audio? Is it only a state of mind? Define the word "audiophile."
Someone who loves music enough to spend time and money to make sure it sounds as close as possible to how it was recorded. It also can be tech-heads who care as much or more about equipment than the music. The music lover always has the bigger music collection; the tech-head has more "demo" recordings.
Anyone who purchases separate components with care—be they from one manufacturer or several—with the express intention of producing a holistic system that will sound better than buying an "all in one" from a high street chain. An audiophile believes that music deserves more than this, be they spending $300, $3000, or $30,000.
In my humble opinion, an audiophile is a music lover who wants to get as close as possible to the original source of a recording. It is not how much you spend, as evidenced by the budget components reviewed by Stereophile.
An audiophile is someone who spends way too much money and a great deal of their time in pursuit of a goal that they can never attain. Me personally, I probably have between $40-50 thousand invested in my two systems. Most people would think that this is an insane amount to spend on a "stereo system". Most of my friends have systems where everything came in one box. But it's amazing to see the look on their faces when they hear the differences between what I have and what they have. If you compare this hobby to any other, you'll find its really not that different in price. For example, a close friend of mine is into motorcycle riding. He has a $75k motorhome, a $10k trailer plus all of his famiy's bikes and stuff to go with it. But here's the real difference between me and him. I get to enjoy my hobby any time I want to, day or night 365 days a year, and I don't even get dirty doing it. He on the other hand only gets to enjoy his hobby maybe 6 to 10 times a year. He has to pay to store all his stuff because it doesn't fit in his driveway and it takes a good day to clean everything up after he's done.
An audiophile is someone who understands that hi-fi is really about the most realistic reproduction of music, regardless of budget. In my mind, a true audiophile is someone who works out their maximum budget for hardware, halves it, and spends the other half on live music, which is what it's all about: music and your emotional response to it and how it makes you feel!
A person who enjoys and appreciates sound. This is a very simple definition but, I think, captures the heart of what the term means in common usage and furthermore, encompasses not only "music" but also sounds not necessarily labeled as music (such as natural sounds), and not only recorded sound but live sound as well.
An audiophile is a sucker who prefers to spend an awful lot of money in "musical event illusion" equipment instead of attending live musical events for a fraction of that amount of money. Definition #2: Also, it's a person convinced that he will achieve the impossible goal of "musical reality" whith the next replacement of one component in its audio rig.
Audiophile: A somewhat demented, azimuth-compulsed, wife-nagging, vinyl-eating, tube-swallowing, cable-inserting, speaker-moving tweaker who is in love with music and its reproduction. I ought to know, as I'm describing myself.
I have no idea, and I don't particularly care! I am a musician who loves great sounding equipment. But I also opt for having as much music as I can when away from home and have an iPod and use 256k or even less at times for MP3s so I can have music when I travel. I don't need appproval for what I love! "Audiophiles" and others could do with some loosening up of their need to label everything! If you like something, be happy with that and don't let anyone tell you it isn't okay, I mean after all, they aren't the ones listening, are they?