Food for thought for all us audiophiles

So the point is we are just fooling ourselves when we spend a lot of money on audio gear. Or maybe it's that we are wasting money. Well what business is it of anyone else how one spends their own money? What should we buy instead? Who decides what's appropriate for me? My guess is there is no shortage of people who will volunteer for the thankless job of dictating your life in the name of "fairness".

After all, the article borrows from the "Journal of ABNORMAL and Social Psychology". Yup, that explains our inability to live in the real world where the Wilsons and Boses are equally special.

To borrow from the article: there are two camps of audiophiles - those who are subjective and want to understand why there are (or are not) differences in audio components, and those who are envious of audiophiles who can afford the seven grand speaker cables. It's that simple IMO.

I guess cognitive dissonance would not apply if you are actually cost conscious. There are many times I want the cheaper, more reliable, lighter gear to sound better but just can't talk myself into keeping the cheaper, inferior sounding equip.. (Unless I subconsciously think that expensive gear are better.) LOL

The fact is (and that's a fact of life): there will be people (audiophiles?) who are purchasing audio components whatever the asking price. If I would make a (good sounding, though not better than the $2,000 version)$100,000 preamplifier, I'm convinced that there is someone who will buy this preamp. The same holds true for a $20,000 interconnect cable and so on... There are people who are so wealthy, they don't even know how to spend their money.

Chris

I disagree with his graph showing how hearing degrades with age. And that he states that if you trust a reviewer who is older than you, you are a fool.

Everyone is different, some have great hearing that lasts a long time, others probably stick closer to that graph. But, the author is making a ganeral statement that if someone is older than you, they have worse hearing than you.

Not mentioned in the article is something that surfaced in FI magazine (no longer published), that the hearing of different cultures is significantly different and it can be measured. The article explored how americans and the british hearing was differenct. In summary, it indicated there is something called a 'cultural equalizer'. Lay all that on the 'class' factor and you really have cognitive dissonance.