At what price is one considered an Audiophile.

Oh, and forget about music, it's all noise. Listen to the sounds. That's audiophile.

I think it is more of an awareness of sound, equipment, market and a conversational interest in sound quality.  Cost is just what you think you can afford to spend.  An audiophile is aware of brands and those products that standout in their budget range without the fear of researching,  buying used with the idea of trading up if when a target product becomes available.  I guess that is the addition of the hobby.  Hopefully we all retain that this is about music and not equipment.  I hope this makes since! 

It’s not a $$$’s spent thing.

It’s the pursuit of accurately reproducing music with sound equipment.

That accuracy, can be empirically based, or, emotionally based. Meaning, one can try to reproduce the sound of an acoustic guitar as it would sound in your room, or, try to reproduce that sound based on how you feel a guitar should sound, or perhaps how a guitar sounds in some important memory you have of a guitar.

Whatever the case, it’s about achieving a specific quality of music reproduction. If you want your music to sound a certain way, you need equipment for that.

Some listen to equipment, most listen to music. Everyone listening to recorded music, listen through equipment. 

Who is Bill @inna and I am over the $10 G threshold, 😅 $500K no way. 

You either like how your system sound to your EARS or you find aspects of how it impacts the signal path that you would like to correct by changing out certain components, tubes, streaming service/software, etc. in your system. How big your budget is you have to work with and what you are trying to achieve is important. For some, however, it is truly about impressing other people with how it looks or costs, but don’t confuse that sort of person with an audiophile. Those sorts of people are truly confused and misguided from an audiophile’s perspective.