It never fails. Browse Stereophile's Facebook page, scroll through the comments to an article that refers to life as an audiophile, and splat—appearing like bird droppings on your glistening screen are anti-audiophile wisecracks pointing out exactly how far off the "normal" track our hobby has derailed. Occasionally, I catch myself in mid-sentence, already replying to one of these droppings, the gist of my intended message invariably being: "If you're an anti-audiophile, what are you doing using up what life you have left reading a webpage devoted to a hobby you don't get? Shouldn't you be hanging out with your own friends?" Then, realizing that I'm wasting my time.
Maybe it's just me, but I've been getting the sense lately that anti-audiophile sentiment is more bitterly hostile than it once was. I vividly recall it consisting, for the longest time, of a general apathy, and whiny exasperation from whomever I'd politely plead with to listen to how great my system sounded. (And it did—I swear!) Obviously, the Internet is a bonanza for those who want to target us, but forget about the quantity of the criticism; what's with the tone? Are non-audiophiles really that fed up with the audiophile lifestyle?
It sure seemed that way when Neil Young's PonoPlayer hit the market. The blogosphere's backlash was spontaneous: a unanimous gag reflex. Most notable about it was not what a mob of non-audiophiles actually said in disparagement of the Pono or Neil Young, but what wasn't said and was clearly readable between the lines. Take a step back, reread the nastier comments, and a picture emerges: The anti-Pono backlash was about more than taking down an oddly shaped portable player: It was a payback-style assault on the audiophile identity. That the ambushee was the PonoPlayer was happenstance; it could have been any audio device with perceived audiophile pretensions that dared to pass itself off as a product for the masses. "Better sound"? "The way music is supposed to be heard"? The nerve!
The episode set my thoughts on two tangents: first, about how the Internet is a bottomless well for spawning irritating people; and second, about how our hobby always gets slammed for the same four infractions:
"The audiophile hobby is an arrogant endeavor exercised by arrogant people." If we can all agree that obnoxious bozos roam both sides of the audiophile/non-audiophile divide, I concede that our hobby is populated by more than its share of them, while noting this happier turn of events: Life on our side has gotten a lot less obnoxious since there's been a lot less of: a) the patriarchal schools of thought that decreed what one had to like, follow, or believe in order to be taken seriously as an audiophile; and b) some of the old-guard bricks-and-mortar audiophile boutiques, whose smug and patronizing sales "help" so often made my presence feel as desired as a gassy bellyache, and left me feeling inadequate, bothersome, and reluctant to ever return to a hi-fi store, even one with a good reputation. I say to such establishments, "Good riddance: Serves you right for not serving right."
"You guys with your silly tweaks that make no scientific/engineering sense?!" My audiophile cred be damned, I can't tell you how often I thought a tweak was doing more for the sound of my system than was the case—which I'd realize sometime later, after I'd removed it. Nonetheless, there is a well-grounded rationale for using tweaks: some of them can mitigate distortions that would otherwise contaminate the musical signal. On the less-grounded side, remember when tweaks, by and large, were both cheap fun and had a plausible-sounding logic behind their workings? Boy, I miss those days. The market is now glutted with tweaks silly and specious, many of them priced as high as sophisticated electronic components.
"You guys care more about sound and gear than music." No doubt some of us mostly do, just as most of us occasionally do—such as when we're itching for a new component or in the throes of Audiophilia nervosa. But this sort of thing can be said of any hobby that, by its very nature, requires the flame of obsession to keep it going. That flame doesn't devalue that hobby's central purpose, which in our case is to use really cool audio gear to turn recordings into living, breathing performances that have the power to steal us away from the present.
"The cost of high-end audio equipment is through the roof!" This is the part of the audiophile belly that attracts the most slings and arrows, and it's easy to see why: The biggest target is the easiest to hit. Prices for competing megabuck audio products are rising at a clip dizzying enough to spin the head of even the staunchest apologist for high-ticket gear. Assuming that the skyrocketing prices are commensurate with advances in parts and technology, is audio equipment really sounding that much better that much faster? And at what point do increases in audible returns diminish to the point where they're simply not worth the increases in price?
My take: Seeing the prices of audio equipment rise in thousand-buck bounds does not ring true with the hobby I fell in love with 30 years ago. What does ring true is the dichotomy that can be found at the other end of the price spectrum: the insuppressible proliferation of audio gear that keeps sounding better at prices more of us can afford. It's those products that are our hobby's best chance of growing in popularity.
At the 2015 Consumer Electronics Show, Neil Young made a point of saying that the PonoPlayer was not an "audiophile" product, but one geared to the general music-loving population. Anyone aware of Young's abiding aversion to both lossy digital compression and artists "selling out" knows he wasn't just paying lip service to sell more Ponos. Young still believes what he's been saying all along: Listeners should be able to hear their recordings the way the artists, producers, and engineers intended.
Neil Young gets it. And he gets it for the same reason we became audiophiles.—Robert Schryer
