Audiophilia: Is it the pursuit of audio excellence or just a desire to tinker.

Being an "audiophile" creates the perfect storm where a profound appreciation of music meets childlike curiosity about how things work, and how to make them better. They say "you can’t blame a compass for pointing north." And you can't blame an "audiophile" for trying "one more thing" to improve the performance of a system.

My granddaugter asked: "Grampa, why are you always working on your old cars?" Me: "Because I’m always fixing things that aren’t broken."

Enjoy the music. And, those zeros and ones, dampening factors, air gap flux densities, Litz inductors, etc.

@jacobsdad2000 the problem was my negligence not your reaction--i thoughtlessly jumped right into the discussion. all the best buddy. happy listening and keep that WAF high!

@curiousjim I try to sit for at least 2 hours in the evening and truly listen, not background noise, but spin up some LP's and fire up the tubes and really listen. Helps me to power down after spending the day fixing the world's problems, well at least the problems in my world. 🤔

Easy question!  It's different things for different people.  Personally, I've always found it odd or difficult to think of what we do as a "hobby", per se.  For some, especially those like The Princess and the Pea, who just can't stop tinkering with their systems, I suppose it's more like a hobby.  Regardless, the common thread, I think, is a powerful love of music.  Some folks are content listening to tunes on a car radio, transistor radio, etc. and probably think audiophiles are nuts for spending the amounts of money we do on our sound systems.  This doesn't mean they don't like music.  They just don't care as much as we do about the quality of the reproduction of that music.  I don't trust anyone who claims not to like music!