are audiophiles different than non audiophiles ?

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.

I am a professional musician, and audiophile. I know many musicians who are also audiophiles. In fact, as a percentage of the population of musicians, there are far more musicians who are audiophiles, than there are audiophiles in the general population.

It is true that many musicians are not interested in being audiophiles. There are many reasons for this:

-Musicians are exposed to live music all the time, and that kind of in-depth familiarity with the sound of real instruments and live music making makes the limitations of even the best audio equipment that much more obvious.
-Some of us love the tweaking, the tinkering, and the simple act of playing with electronic toys (second to the music, of course). If you think that you can get that itch scratched by the latest cable or isolation device, you have no idea the kind of options and possibilities that are available to musicians when it comes to tweaking/fine-tuning their instruments! It is an endless font of possibilities. I assure you that the audible differences between Nordost and Jena cabling (for example) pale in comparison to the differences between one brand of reed (or guitar strings) and another. Particularly when one realizes that the differences are not simply things that we hear, but also things that affect the way the instrument actually responds and feels, and consequently affect one's performance.
-Many musicians listen mainly for study purposes. The need to have the playback quality be just so is way down the list of important considerations. Playback quality needs to be good, but not necessarily of audiophile pedigree for a musician to be able to hear what needs to be heard.

I am always amused by the often used example in audio equipment reviews of the fact that such and such component "allows the listener to distiguish between the sound of an oboe and an English horn". The difference between the sound of an oboe and an English horn is obvious to any orchestral musician catching the first sounds of the Muzak being played inside the Home Depot, while still in the parking lot.

Musicians call it "GAS" - or Gear Acquisition Syndrome (the origin is believed to be Guitar Acquisition Syndrome).

Ultimately the love of music and sound manifests itself in a large amount of gear and there is a constant desire to not merely upgrade but also accumulate.

Example of GAS

In the case of many successful male musicians this compulsive behaviour applies in other areas too...

Frogman could not have stated the case better. As a professional musician myself, I agree with 100% of his post. There are indeed more audiophiles among musicians than in any other profession, as a percentage, especially when we are talking about classical musicians in particular. It is also true, as Orpheus said, that the average professional musician hears far more than the average audiophile when listening to music - our ears are very well trained from a very young age to hear a great many different types of things, including such things as Frogman's equipment example.

I have said this many times before here, but it always bears repeating - one of the best things an audiophile could do to deepen their appreciation of whatever type of music they listen to would be to take an ear training course at a local college. Even if one is not offered, there may be a grad student in music theory who would be willing to give private instruction - this is good experience for them, too. This type of work will also help greatly in learning to hear differences between pieces of audio equipment, too.

Unfortunately, I have never even met a "classical" musician. It's possible they have different lifestyles from jazz and rock musicians. Since that was a long time ago when I hung out with jazz and rock musicians, a lot has changed, and I wrote from personal experience plus the articles in "Stereophile".

If we got really loose with the definition of "audiophile", we could probably include some of the musicians I knew.