Audiophilism is a hobby

Upgrading without ever learning about acoustics is  very often deluding ourselves...

Billy is not a strawman it is an existing  character... It is who i was before learning and experimenting ...

My name was Billy ...😊

He described me.😁 Are you saying that i was the only one Billy here?

Reading audio threads there is a crowd of Billy here who are like i was not so long ago  ...

Many upgrade because they dont know what else to do to improve what they own already which is good but not enough when you read marketing stuff without reading about acoustics, and mechanical and electrical working dimensions controls which are the optimizations solutions not buying a costlier piece each time ...

Billy is a great rarity or doesn’t exist at all. A strawman to use for the sake of argument.

You can keep an eye on what’s going on in audio and do upgrades from time to time and still be very happy with the sound you have now. I think that audio is progressing and it makes sense to keep up with what’s new.

@mashif: Fantastic, thank you SOOO much! I read No Depression for years (I have a complete collection of the original---pre-online---run of the mag, but I obviously need to catch up with their current issues).

For those who read the article mashif provided a link to, that should give you an idea of how special Julie and Buddy Miller are. As is Iris DeMent. And Lucinda Williams.

@tomcy6 No, pointing out the obvious fact that there are many audiophiles who play music and, instead of just enjoying the music, sit there and over-analyze fidelity-related minutiae, wherein dismay at disappointing fidelity is often the experience (just pursuing this very thread and hearing people say they won’t even listen to music, no matter how good, unless it has ‘good sound,’ will indicate this), is not a “straw man argument.”  
For one, it wasn’t an argument, it was a clarification of the issue; a couple posters said they didn’t understand why for many there was a conflict between enjoying music and striving for maximized fidelity, so I provided the clarification as best I could.  
For two, again, you can look on this very site and find several people dismissing outright God knows how much great music because “the sound is bad.”  
Perhaps you and others spent x-amount of time (months? years? decades?) maximizing your system’s fidelity, and at no point did you find yourself analyzing the fidelity instead of just enjoying the music (which is sort of impossible - a non-audiophile just listens to music…an audiophile, by nature, must divorce themselves from sheer enjoyment of the music itself to meticulously and diligently analyze the sound), then, well, hats off to you.  
Any way you slice it, there is no “straw man” here. 

 

Audiophile Billy is sitting there fretting about the distortion, the transient accuracy, the imaging, the soundstage, on and on and on and on….

Billy is a ball of anxiety, angst and minutiae-scrutinizing madness.

I have never met anyone who listens like that nor have I read posts by those poor people.   If you can provide links to posts by all the Audiophile Billies around here I'll be happy to read them and maybe learn something.  I guess I just don't read those threads.

@tomcy6 i fit that description to a large degree. On the other hand I am not really an audiophile.