Should people with no turntable or reel to reel be considered audiophiles?

“Reduced information“ means different things to different people. For the electrical portion of the system Signal to Noise ratio and Dynamic Range are very good measures of “information.” Theoretically, digital should win hands down, you know, with stated SIGNAL TO NOISE ratio of at least 90dB and DYNAMIC RANGE at least 90dB. But things don’t always work out in the real world like they do theoretically.

Playback systems have inherent issues as I’ve oft pointed out that reduce the theoretical values of SNR and DR to where LP playback competes with CD playback, there are too many variables to say which is better in terms of “information” retrieval. It’s apples and watermelons usually . The industry further exacerbates this problem by overly compressing CDs and LPs. So, you can’t win. Other harder to define aspects of sound like sweetness, air, tone, transparency, etc. come into play as well, and can also be considered “information.”

Hello,
I believe if you
love to listen to music you are an Audiophile. The medium keeps changing and probably will do so in the future. If I kept to analog I would have missed out on a lot of new music and artists that I found streaming. In the end I get to enjoy even more different types of music and spend more time enjoying it and my system. Who knows in a 100 years the purists might be the ones who stream due to new technology. In the end our body and brain have to convert sound waves to electrical current to interpret what was recorded on the black record. Who is to say we cannot go directly to electrical and still feel like we are experiencing the analog record. We can just remove our built in DAC so to speak. 

Of course what we hear is subjective.....if you think it sounds better it does.

as far  As “more” information,think of the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. Which is more precise or has more information, 3.1417, or the symbol for pi? Records well recorded and pressed ones in good shape are pi. Or think of 1/9 or .1111111111111111111. I do believe in the real world and majored in engineering, not math, but certainly had to take lots of math classes. Turntables deliver infinite significant digits of information.

Lets make them Audiophiles as there are thousands of CD player and streaming people.

sokogear

Turntables deliver infinite significant digits of information.

No, they don't. That's why they're bandwidth-limited and have finite frequency response, dynamic range, and s/n.

I'm an analog guy at heart. But the notion that it is "continuous" or "infinite" while digital is sliced into a lot of little pieces is mistaken and easily shown to be false.