are audiophiles different than non audiophiles ?

I have never met a professional musician, who would fall into the audiophile category. That's a peculiar contradiction.

"I have never met a professional musician, who would fall into the audiophile category"

I haven't met one either but there are examples, how about Keith Jarrett? I would tend to agree that most don't since live and recorded are two different things that can't be reconciled by a musician when listening to a "audiophile" or "high end" system. Just a hunch.

Orpheus, plenty of successful musicians buy high end gear - just look at the user list of many audio equipment manufacturer's.

RW the ".", is not a period, it's a full stop! We on the other side of the pond invented the language, sort of, so we get to give the punctuation correct names.

Stereophile ran a series where they interviewed famous musicians. Branford Marsalis, Tony Bennett, and John Lee Hooker are three that I remembered. Branford had Herron Audio, which is top notch, John Lee had all Kenwood, and Tony's rig was in a beautiful custom console that fit in with his furnitue. John Lee said his Kenwood gave him the "funky" sound he liked.

During the course of these interviews it became apparent that "high end" music was not a big turn on although they most certainly could afford it. The professional musicians I knew personally preferred digital cassettes, and were moving too fast to consider the detail involved in high end audio, besides the fact that they spent most of their time listening to live music.

A professional musician can hear more in an ordinary audio cassette than we can hear on high end analog, they hear all the music and what each musician is doing, while audiophile's hear the noise.