Audiophile Blind Tests
Discussions debate the subjectivity of audio quality perception, with audiophiles claiming differences in high-end equipment that often fail blind tests, highlighting placebo effects and objective measurements.
Activity Over Time
Top Contributors
Keywords
Sample Comments
It's subjective, like in high end audio.
A brain is subjective. I believe many audiophiles indeed perceive audio quality difference so those products do really make a difference for them.
100% - most 'audiophile' wouldn't pass a blind test checking audio quality.
As you say, not a blind test.It's very easy to convince yourself that something is helping. It's very common in audio production circles to have had the experience of working on, say, a snare track, tweaking EQ or whatever, and to convince yourself that you've improved it only to realise that the EQ is bypassed or you're on the wrong channel - basically you wiggle some knobs that make absolutely no difference to the sound but still hear a difference.I'm pleased you
It's hard to notice subtle things without an A/B test, it might just be that quiet parts of certain songs just don't sound as good.For something like this you would want to measure the noise levels, not make assumptions about audiophiles being wrong; they're only wrong a significant fraction of the time.
You’re an audiophile. Not everyone is.
Audiophiles basically agree that ears are sub-par
We're talking audiophiles, it's not like they're trying to cheap out.
Like wine, most audio tech and most "audiophiles" is entirely reasonable. Listening to your favourite album on a $10000 hifi setup is a much better experience than listening to it over Spotify on the cheap earbuds that came with your phone. Some speakers do obviously sound better that others, and how you place those speakers in your room objectively has an effect on how good they sound. People with good ears can absolutely hear the difference between cheap and expensive amps and DACs.
As someone who used to be in to audiophilia, debates on sound quality of equipment and the supposed night and day differences are an incredible exercise in futility and purchase justification. Smoke some cannabis and $5 earbuds fed by a no-name MP3 player will deliver more detail than the custom modded Sennheisers fed by an amp and DAC stack imported from a boutique in Belgium would have gotten you otherwise.