Audiophiles are total extremists. They will do nearly anything and spend money wildly to get their audiophile buzz. People not involved with the hobby often hear about their antics and don’t believe that it is true. They actually are.
Lots goes into this although the cliché of needing to spend a fortune on equipment or buying more and more esoteric equipment is bullshit. So is propping up your speaker cables on little saw horses. So is painting the outside of your Compact Discs with green paint. So is arranging Mpingo disc all over your room. So is replacing your well-insulated AC power chords. So is using a $4,000 fuse in your AC power box. That’s all audiophile garbage sold to you by the OK Boomer audiophile print magazines.
Many audiophiles who live in big cities that often suffer from less than the most pure electricity will stay up until late hours to listen. The idea is that they will have less demands on their AC power thus they will be able to attain better sound later at night. A good AC power conditioner or an audiophile power regenerator would help if you want the best sound at 1:00 PM versus at 1:00 AM.
With some of the most well-made power amplifiers in the world, audiophiles will remove and replace the power cables with unbelievably expensive, aftermarket power cables. These cables can cost more than $10,000 per power cable. Imagine the ego-maniac AV designers who make $20,000 amps skimping on a product like a power chord? It has never happened once but there are jackasses in the audiophile business who drive bright red, new Ferraris because of audiophile stupidity.
There are some Baby Boomer audiophiles who think that everything old is somehow better. This manifests itself as a NOS which often is known as “Not On Sale” products. Allow me to explain… in the nearly 35 years of advancement in digital audio, these 60-year-old brain surgeons or rocket scientists buy a CD player or DAC that has a processor chip from a first generation, mid-1980s CD player as opposed to using today’s state-of-the-art chips that literally have PERFECT sine wave reproduction. They are perfect chips but they aren’t good enough. These morons use old products that have the high frequency performance of a cat on meth climbing up a screen door. Then they insert a tube into the signal path to “smooth out” the sound. You could have had smooth sound if you used a modern $2 chip, dumbass.
The concept of putting Bald Eagle semen on the analog outputs of your latest stereo preamp or having the platter of their Audiophile Turntable made of un-obtainuium. Some even will break in their Audiophile Headphones which has been proven in studies to have literally zero benefit.
You don’t have to be a jackass to be an audiophile. You need to love music and tech and want the lifestyle benefits that comes from settling down to listen to your favorite tunes. Don’t let the voodoo and bullshit from the audiophile hobby dissuade you from the point at hand.