linden518
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Fremer vs. Teachout
trevort
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Thoughtul, well-written post! I read it twice: your balanced but discriminating perspective is an asset to the forum.

linden518
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Thanks, ttt, for your compliments. And especially for the star! I always wondered how one ended up w/ one of those...

dcstep
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Great post SelfDivider. I spent an hour yesterday exploring your web site and highly recommend it to others on this forum.

About MF's analogies I actually think they're quite apt. Take the Ferrari. To a non-car guy or anti-car guy, all Ferraris and all Ferrari owners are the ultimate symbols of materialism at its worst. Indeed, many owners couldn't properly drive their cars to save their lives, but, in the right hands, it can be a fine instrument that does things that few other cars can come close. The ultimate Ferrari owner/driver is many-time world champion driver, Michael Schumacher. What else might MS drive? Well, anything he wants, including the ultimate performance car from his native land Mercedes.

Audio has some of the same image problem. People building a $4 million home often "throw in" a $300,000 AV system with all kinds of capacity that they could never hope to use, much less understand and appreciate. What if the owner of said system is conductor of the Berlin Phil and actually listens to music on his system? We'd have a totally different view.

No one denigrates a virtuouso concert violinist owning a multi-million dollar violin, but what if the same violin were owned by a 30-year old hedge fund manager that just received a $40 million bonus from packaging mortgages into securities that few could understand.

Like it or not, we're associated with a hobby that many consider elitist. Unfortunately, I've met more than a couple audiophiles that seemed elitist to me, buying certain components because "they could" rather than because it increased their enjoyment of music.

Keep up your great contributions. Please, please, please.

Dave

linden518
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Good point, Dave. I actually know what you're talking about in regards to a certain type of audiophiles, as I've met a few of those (I live in Manhattan, after all.) The Ferrari analogy fits them all too well. But I guess I'm speaking for some of the others, who are just... you know... ordinary except in our quest for the best possible sound. As for me, that kind of analogy doesn't sit well with me b/c basically, I can't identify with it.

There will always be the kind of elitist audiophiles who upgrade ad nauseum "just because they can." But I think there is a way for us to challenge that kind of a status quo notion of audiophiles, and I think Fremer's article was an important step forward in that regard, despite those analogies at the end. I guess I can go back to classical music as an example. Before LA Philharmonic hired Esa Pekka Salonen, the orchestra was in a rut. Fighting dwindling attendance, it kept programming the old standards. Classical music was for old, rich elitist people; the youth attendance was negligible. Then Salonen came in, really shook up the status quo. Put in a lot of bold, contemporary music, challegning programs. (I'm also thinking of Michael Tilson Thomas at SF, etc.) The public - gasp - liked the change. The youth attendance skyrocketed. It rejuvenated the orchestra as well as the downtown life there. Classical music wasn't just Brahms, Bach, Beethoven, but also Saariaho, Steve Reich and Golijov. As such, classical music just becomes "music," especially when you hear outfits like LCD Soundsystem pay homage to Steve Reich (i.e. the song "All My Friends.")

I think you're right that the status quo notion of "audiophile" seems almost inextricably linked to a kind of elitism. Can that preconceived notion/bias change? I may be wrong and/or foolish, but I don't think it has to be that way, and I hope it doesn't stay that way.

P.S. - Thanks for reading my blog, Dave!

dcstep
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Audiophilia may be reaching a "tipping point" where it might come out of the shadow of the elitist image. The iPod generation (my daughter and many millions of other 20-somethings) is starting to notice "good sound" vs. compressed sound.

I don't know the demographics, but I suspect that www.head-fi.org is populated by a mostly young audience. The forum is incredibly vibrant with over 1000 posts per hour, I'm guessing. These people are as serious about their headphones, DACs, headphone amps, iMods (modded iPods), etc. as we are our turntables, amps, speakers and cables.

There seems to be a wave of people buying into the concept that quality matters. Maybe, just maybe, being an audiophile will stop being an old fart's sports (sorry to those of you under 60 that don't techinically qualify yet as OFs). My daughter is a geek and the head-fi cadre are not your average young people, but the wave seems big.

Let's cross our fingers and see what happens.

Dave

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