Anyone ever try combining both to make a gold-plated amethyst fiber toslink cable for $25000 that wards off 5G interference?

When I was in high school, late 90s, I dated a chick whose mom worked in a bakery. She started work at like 2AM and for some reason I don't remember, my gf had to go there and she asked me to go with her...sure fuck it (we pretty much ran free back then, different time) and we went down there. About a half dozen middle-aged women making batter and dough and whatever they did and their boss, the bakery's owner.

He was in his early 40s, and was like the love child of David Lee Roth and Otto the bus driver from The Simpsons. Cargo shorts, dirty sneakers, Motley Crue tshirt with a blond curly mullet and an earring in one ear. For being 2 in the morning he was wide eyed and he practically exploded as soon as I walked in the door "HEY MAN HOWS IT GOING?! WELCOME TO MY BAKERY!! YOU LIKE MUSIC?! WHAT KIND OF MUSIC DO YOU LIKE?! WANT TO SEE SOMETHING?!" I was honestly on the edge of fight or flight for a moment but despite the coke or just how fuckin excited he was to have a visitor, he seemed safe, so I was like "Yeah sure, what's up?"

Leads me back to the far corner of the bakery to his office. There are speakers fucking everywhere. In his office he has racks and racks of high end stereo equipment, and he immediately launches into all this technical detail about the setup that I'm just nodding through...."SO THE SIGNAL COMES DOWN HERE THROUGH THIS SPECIAL CABLES...100 BUCKS A FOOT BUT ITS SO WORTH IT...THIS TAKES THE SIGNAL AND MUXES IT WITH THE AMPLIFIER THAN PIPES IT TO THE FLUX CAPACITOR THEN..." and eventually he wraps up and says "CHECK THIS OUT!!!"

Pulls out one of those gold, high bitrate CDs, Peter Gabriel's So, slots it into a CD player that by itself was bigger and more complicated looking than my whole stereo at home with so many knobs and shit, and cranks it to what he called about 30%. Lights blinking, animated EQs, level meters at the ready...

Red Rain kicks in and literally takes my breath away, not just in awe, but I mean the goddamn bass was so heavy and so crystal clear that it disrupted the airflow in the entire bakery. The volume was beyond screaming over, it was like you were standing on fucking stage in an arena next to the amps, but not only was it ear-shatteringly loud, it was crystal clear. Like the level of detail and fidelity in the recording broadcasted all these little human moments in the playing that I never had heard before and my mom pretty much blasted that record all the time for most of the tail end of the 80s. After a minute of Red Rain he skips to track two, Sledgehammer and holy shit, that bass riff on that system...felt like when you're standing waist deep in the ocean and a wave comes up with enough force to rock you on your feet before you recover.

And through all this, these women in the bakery just doing their thing, not a care in the world. Clearly a common occurrence there, 2 oclock in the morning, deep in an industrial area with nobody for miles around, this dude and his like $100,000+ stereo and him just running around like a madman making whatever the hell they were making.

Anyways, definitely nothing I would ever spend that kind of money on, but man, it was hard as hell to go back home to my shitty $20 headphones and my discman after hearing what $100k worth of high end stereo equipment sounds like lol

I don't think anyone with self awareness or love for sound or music would call themselves an audiophile tbf.

Alan Parsons was the sound engineer on Dark Side of the Moon, AND Abbey Road.

I think we can trust Alan Parsons. The dude put a frickin laser on the moon!

Man, tinnitus is such a money saver

I don't know if I qualify as an audiophile or not... I like expensive headphones and high resolution audio but I'm not one of those idiots that pays $10,000 for an HDMI cable.

I listen to music to enjoy it. The only thing that really stops me enjoying it is if it sounds like shit, which 99% of the time is because it's some badly encoded lossy stream being played through a shitty Bluetooth speaker on SBC codec. That is not what music is supposed to sound like.

Give me some basic appointment that correctly reproduces what the artist created, and I'll be happy. That doesn't have to cost a fortune, you just need a lossless stream with a half decent DAC/amp into decent headphones, and you'll be blown away. Spend like $300 on a pair of non-wireless analog headphones, $50-$75 on a USB DAC, and by a subscription to Tidal or Qobuz. It'll change how you think about music. But it doesn't turn you into an asshole.

Be honest, how many audiophiles do you actually know? I work in pro AV and have been surrounded by audiophiles for 20+ years and this applies to exactly 1 person I've ever known and it was freshman year of college

Sounds like this person you're describing is just a douchebag who wants to sound smart. We'd love to tell you all about our systems but we're not gonna complain about your Walmart soundbar unprompted

Me and my dad can't watch a movie or a sports broadcast without going on about the cameras and the lenses and the angles and the framerate and the exposure etc... and it drives my mom nuts. So hi mom.

My friend is a different sort of audiophile. He finds every setup and location to be a new opportunity to hear the music he loves in a way that he's never heard it before.

I think it's like any other piece of art. It's up to the person listening / watching / viewing to decide how it appeals to them.

I love bass, I play bass (badly), I like hearing the bass in songs. Sometimes I'll listen so that I can really hear and appreciate the bass. I've even been known to isolated Bass stems of songs not to learn them, just because I love the bass part. Other times I'll listen so that the bass blends in to the overall sound and appreciate the entire thing.

I love this comment. It's origins are from the 60's and was bandied about by rich white guys. The reason they said flat is best, is because that's all there was back then Mono was king.

As for that's how the music was meant to be recorded and heard. Ask a hip hop producer about that...

All hail flat response! But alas, a lot of (and even most of, likely) the music is mastered to sound good on cheap stuff with bloated bass - as that is how it is listened by the paying majority. So when you (and me, love my Adam Audio stuff!) turn that on, we hear sad tunes... So getting a well mastered copy is equally important.

It's meant to be heard on shopping mall speakers 30 years later. That's when most of the royalties come in.

exactly how the music was meant to be recorded and heard.

Is it? Every producer is different, every studio has different equipment and most importantly, everyone's ears are different. You can't possibly know what they intended.

The truth is that the correct way to listen to music is however you like it to hear it!

Audiophile: "The aluminum cones on these tweeters were precision engineered to give an unbiased audio signal at up to 30,000hz."

Musician: "Some asshole barfed into my amp and now it has this buzz and catches on fire if I leave it plugged in for too long, but I still like how it sounds so we recorded the whole album on it."

I know it from 30 Rock

PETE: Oh, my god, you're gonna heckle him, like that time I invited you to see my cover band.

LIZ: Yeah, and today the world is better off without the Pete Hornberger Alan Parsons Project Project.

He produced Dark Side of the Moon