I am an old school.I am not into the movies,I am into the music.I still have collection of LPs and CDs.My old equipments is hi-tech  pre/pro componets carefully collected during the 70-ties .Still running,And 15 years ago I removed it from my appartment to the cottage on the island.Few years ago,I even added decent AVR and set of high quality 6.1 speakers set,so the kids can have streaming and watching movies.And it sounds fantastic to me,as well as to my family.Am I an audiophile?Yes,I am.

At the same time,15 years ago,I purchased my first B&O,Ouverture and pair of Beolabs 8000.Two years later pair of Beolabs 4000 and Beolab 2.And Beovision.Now,when we come back from the island to the appartment,and I switch on B&O,even wife and kids use to say:This  is different world! Am I still an audiophile?Yes,I am.

You are an audiophile as long as you feel the music!

That is some serious research and dedication of time !

Thank you for giving a balanced summary of discoveries to date.

I loved your painting of the spectrum of dealers 😐

And I hope your exploration does bring you to the conclusion ...

seethroughyou wrote:

Long live Bang & Olufsen!

... and saves you from a purple pleasure palace !

StUrrock wrote:

In the old days audiophile meant to me that the playback was as true to the original sound performance as possible.

With pure acoustic performances with little or no processing etc this was always a joy and B&O try really hard to achieve this simple goal.

However today there is so much tweaking, processing, auto tuning and the like on many recordings. Really great equipment can IMHO emphasise these artificial sounds and the recording actually sounds worse on high quality equipment in a perverse sort of way.

I couldn't agree more 🤒

Funnily enough, I've just returned from two days at the Munich High End Hi-Fi Show last week and i suppose that one might not unreasonably consider this to be Audiophile Mecca!

Frankly, some of the stuff there was downright weird, some plain daft, some ridiculous and some utterly fabulous. I spent a lot of time laughing quietly to myself and a certain amount of time crying quietly inside at the hideousness I was listening to! However, i also spent several hours in front of a handful of systems absolutely spellbound by the quality on offer. In one room I could almost swear that a live jazz trio was playing behind the acoustic screens that were sat behind the speakers - it was so realistic. However, the price tag was somewhere in the >200,000 Euro region, so I won't be buying it any time soon.

To me, the definition of audiophile (in THEORY at last) is summed up by the earlier comment about the love of music, but I think all too often the image is hijacked by the moneyed toy-freak with piles of expensive equipment and a handful of test discs to play on it - to me, this is not an audiophile!

Personally speaking, I currently have 25 turntables and about 10 pairs of speakers and i love buying items, repairing them, trying them out and either keeping them or selling them on. On the face of it, this would seem to make me the worst kind of "audiophile" and people assume that my main system changes every ten minutes! However, they are wrong. My main system has stayed pretty much the same for the last five years or so, as has the Beolab 8000 system in the dining room. The new items merely swap in and out on occasion when I wish to play with them.

So, in summary, if you wish to use it as an insult, then "audiophile" is probably a person who is obsesses with having the best (at least until the next 'best' comes along), worries about cables, cable stands, quantum purifiers, shakti stones and views music as a necessary evil to make the stuff do something. On the other hand, I would wager most of us who have been called it in the past prefer to think of it as marking us out as real music enthusiasts who want to hear the material in the best way possible, whether this involves B&O or not.

Had both.  B&O is the bomb.

Superb style, and great sound if set up properly.

Some of B&O cheaper speakers sound 'very average.'

This is the same with any manufacturer.

Listen to a Century (over 20 years old) and the sound is just amazing, compared to all these new bluetooth speakers or compact systems.)

RIP Jacob Jensen (you big spunk.)

True pioneer.

I'm definitely not with you on that about the Century Chaka. I've owned one since 1999 and it's sound is lifeless on dance music. Very very bland sound and the cabinet vibrates with the slightest volume increase. The A8 is a far better sounding system - whether its as good as the B&W Zeppelin in terms of treble and clarity, I don't think so. Again, personal choice. I prefer a brighter sound which B&O does not seem to supply. :(

I remember years ago hearing a pop musician explaining how their tracks were overproduced to overcome the shortcomings of an ordinary radio on which it might be played. Therefore when played on a good sound system it'd sound a bit intense he explained. I'm not sure this applies so much nowadays . 

If this is being an audiophile, I am not an audiophile!