At what price is one considered an Audiophile.

@jacobsdad2000 Sorry and I don’t mean anthing bad about anbody and at this site I have never noticed (and not saying there isn’t) any obvious females talking about audio gear. But I do suspect behind every audiophile that is married or lives with a women will get the LOOK 🙄when spending money on thier Audio System.

There are plenty of women who spend a considerable amount of cash (atleast up in the 5k ballpark) and have rigs that sound very good. At that point, they are satisfied and tend to focus more on the music, discovering new artists, growing their music collection, etc, which is the whole point of great sounding gear in the first place. In other words, they seem to be more of the "music first" audiophile...

It’s the "dude" who thinks that a 15k cable will fix all his setup errors and his lousy room, i.e. continues to spend up the dum-deedee tree. Blame the cable for everything in the end!! 😁 It’s the "dude" who generally sits around with a 300k rig that still sounds like sht in spite of all the glitter in his room....living in a state of constant disgruntlement.

"All that glitters ain’t gold!"

- Prince

We will call prime meaningful sounds, natural sounds, music or speech...

Guess who by design must be sensible to ANY sound detection for reason of care and protection and for a best socialization of his offsprings ?

Female hearing is more sensible to high frequencies recognition for this reason ...

Then they listen music and are less prone to go for marketing gear fetichism a disease among audiophiles who ignore any acoustics basic embeddings and anything which is not gear bragging ... I exagerate to spell my point but that is my observation in all audio threads...And who call me "tin foil hat" because of a low cost tweak ? Grown men hypnotized by marketing and obsessive about price tag , oblivious of any mechanical,electrical and acoustical embeddings and about psycho-acoutics, obsessed by possible costly upgrades ... 😊

@jacobsdad2000 Just had Dylan Mulvany delivering my free Bud Light. 🤣 and she/he asked what an Audiophile was.                                                                         Bud light comes in real handy when you need target practice. 🎯

@deep_333 I do think guys are more motivated toward the gear aspect of audio. However with steaming available I listen more than I ever had. Back in the 1990's     I built a system modeled after Cory Greenberg's (stereophile) poormans hi end rig and it seemed no matter how many cd's I bought I never seem to have enough to listen to that wasn't tired. So here I am 30yrs later just loving the endless amount of songs through streaming and with a better rig. But my live in girlfriend thinks I should spend more on our house which I admit is more practicle. She will always mention it if there is a song playing that she likes but will never mention how good it sounds through my system.

You start with the room 1st. I built a room within a room in a custom house and the room plus treatments were $60,000, before spending 1 dime on electronics. When you are designing a custom home with a custom audio room, it’s cheaper to do things in the beginning than to retrofit it. I have friends that spent more than that on their rooms.

As for equipment, money spent does matter. Everything in the audio stream matters: the microphones, the cables for the mics, the artists amps/guitars/piano, mixers, the recorders, just before it gets recorded on the medium. Engineers do not use $200 pioneer reel to reels to record a song. 
 

I don’t think it matters if you like music or you like the equipment, if you just like the music, get you a pair of beats headphones and call it a day. If you want the best sound quality possible, then it’s going to cost you. $500 speakers modified to the hilt will still sound like $500 speakers, same goes for amps/dacs/etc