C|Net columnist Steve Guttenberg touched—or rather jangled—a collective nerve in a recent column, in which he asked why it is that audiophiles often recoil from identifying themselves as audiophiles. His comments section, usually well-mannered on the whole, erupted into vitriol, flames, and other such digital mayhem. The posters weren’t attacking Steve Guttenberg or his opinions. They were going collectively gaga over the word audiophile and their reactions to same.
A scan through the comments reveals that the term has acquired a solid layer of unpleasant associations. That’s quite different from the situation with other ‘phile’ words, such as oenophile or cinephile or the like. In most cases, the phile simply means that you are a devotée of something, perhaps more serious about it than most, but that’s about all. True, certain other and less wholesome words creep into mind, words like pedophile and coprophile and necrophile, but nonetheless the balance is overall neutral, at least to my ear. The noun comes off as more prickly: audiophilia has a certain unsanitary gestalt on the whole; that may be thanks to moderate-usage words such as pedophilia and necrophilia, whereas one rarely encounters oenophilia or cinephilia. The mysterious workings of usage have decreed that –phile might be used without necessarily negative connotations (Stereophile magazine, for instance,) but the noun form is almost wholly negative. And there it is.
Nevertheless, audiophile has an unpleasant ring to it, a sense of the absurd or extremist. Although I definitely belong to the tribe, I’m also uncomfortable with the word. That’s because I don’t want anybody thinking that I’m one of those nutjobs who puts pyramidally-shaped stones on top of my amplifier or who is willing to put down $20,000 for a three-foot-long connecting cable. Or that I’m going to be utterly impossible to talk to about my interests, given the likelihood that I’ll be shrill and unreasonable about some issue or another—vinyl vs. CD, hi-resolution digital vs. mp3, tubes vs. solid-state—or the like. The connotation of an audiophile as a middle-aged white guy (well, that’s me) without any musical skills to speak of (that’s definitely not me) who goes into transports over the latest all-analog girl-with-a-guitar recording from a boutique audiophile record label (gawdalmighty and jehosophat that’s not me) played through his gigantic and electricity-sucking system that cost more than most people’s houses (again, I plead my innocence.)
That’s really too bad because at its heart the quest for superb audio quality is rather noble in its way. It’s all about going the extra mile, never being satisfied with the merely adequate. As an artist, I consider such a mindset as an axiom, not even up for debate. Even if the quest is far less elevated than, say, Beethoven’s legendary tussles with his creative muses or Corelli’s endless tweaking and fussing after that last refinement, it’s still an example of discernment, and it’s altogether harmless. Without equanimity, extremism can arise, and that’s where the trouble starts.
The siren song can attract even those amongst us who consider themselves resistant to motion towards the fringes. I discovered that there was, indeed, a discernible difference between a stock USB cable and a higher-quality one, something which I wouldn’t have accepted at face value. My ears demonstrated otherwise. Once I thought through the design of the thing—digital cables transmit their signals using good old analog voltage fluctuations, remember, and a USB cable carries DC current along with the data signal—I realized that better shielding and materials could result in fewer errors to correct at the receiving end, therefore bringing about a palpable improvement in sound. In effect it’s the same as subjecting a vinyl LP to a very thoroughgoing cleaning before digitizing it; every click or pop you have to remove using software is a moment of lost original musical data, after all, and when enough clicks and pops have been removed the net effect is like blurring a newspaper photo to remove all the little dots. But to accept that an el-cheapo USB cable can be improved by one that isolates current from data is a far cry from concluding that a $5000 USB cable is going to be an improvement over a $75 one. That’s the absurdist/extremist fringe in audiophilia that seems to cause so much of the negativity.
A commentor on Guttenberg’s article put it succinctly: “Cable risers, shakti stones, $5000 speaker cables, magic pebbles and $1000 power cables make the hobby embarrassing.”
Hallelujah, amen, and right-on-man to that. The word audiophile is probably dead meat by now, done to death by astronomic prices and Dadaist claims. But audio itself—well, that’s just fine and dandy.