*have you ever looked at a sound forum? There is no middle ground whatsoever between ‘person who doesn’t give a shit’ and ‘total audiophile who cares about things only your dog can hear’)
Yeah, they always entertain me with their oxygen free rare earth element cables connected using unicorn polished gold plated connectors… In contrast I like to think I exist in the middleground and have retained a degree of sanity. We have ‘nice’ speakers and a ‘good quality’ amp (that got rave reviews back when it was introduced).
I have a decent vinyl deck. Our CD / DVD player is a ‘whatever’ item (I’ve only ever had one that made me realise there was a difference between cheap CD players and better ones, and that was back when finding a CD player for under £200 was incredibly difficult (it took me a year to save up for my £100 CD player made by *RadioShack)). These days I think you have to pretty far down the CD/DVD/Blu-ray ranges to get to something that sounds shit.
The cable linking that kit to the speakers was not the cheapest, nor by any stretch the most expensive. Mainly I picked it because it was hardy enough to run under the floor & through the wall without me worrying I needed to run it in something.
The things that amuse me the most though are things like the blind audio testing my friend did with some audiophiles where they couldn’t tell the difference between coat-hangers and their posh new cables. Or, and I’m not sure if I told you this story, a visitor to our house (who will remain nameless) has another customer he visits who has an extortionately expensive Swiss or French valve amplifier that can only be serviced by paying for an engineer to visit from said european country.
He’s got a £10000 record deck.
He’s got some of those ridiculous oxygen free cables.
It would not surprise me if he’s got an Acoustic System Phase Corrector.
He was showing it off to our informant, but after playing just one piece of vinyl he proclaimed that the problem with vinyl was that it was lots of hassle, and that he preferred to listen to MP3s on it.
*sigh*
* Well, actually it was a ‘Tandy’ own brand.
