An audiophile (from Latin: audīre, lit. 'to hear' + Greek: φίλος, romanized: philos, lit. 'loving') is a person who is enthusiastic about high-fidelity sound reproduction.[1] An audiophile seeks to reproduce recorded music to achieve high sound quality, typically in a quiet listening space and in a room with good acoustics.[2][3]
Audiophile values may be applied at all stages of music reproduction: the initial audio recording, the production process, and the playback, usually in a home setting. In general, the values of an audiophile are seen to be antithetical to the growing popularity of more convenient but lower-quality music, especially lossy digital file types like MP3, lower-definition streaming services, and low-cost headphones.[4]
The term high-end audio refers to playback equipment used by audiophiles, which may be bought at specialist shops and websites.[5] High-end components include turntables, digital-to-analog converters, equalization devices, preamplifiers and amplifiers (both solid-state and vacuum tube), loudspeakers (including horn, electrostatic and magnetostatic speakers), power conditioners, subwoofers, headphones, and acoustic room treatment in addition to room correction devices.[6][7]
Although many audiophile techniques are based on objective criteria that can be verified using techniques like ABX testing, perceived sound quality is necessarily subjective, often with subtle differences, leading to some more controversial audiophile techniques being based on pseudoscientific principles.[8][9]
^"Audiophile". Dictionary.reference.com. 2011. Retrieved 6 December 2011.
^Lichte, Erick (2 July 2012). "Audio Research Reference 150 power amplifier". Stereophile.
^Doris, Frank (1993). "Hi Fi in the Arena: The Concert Sound of the Grateful Dead". The Absolute Sound.
^Kurutz, Steven (24 July 2013). "The new audio geeks". The New York Times.
^Perlman, M. (2004). "Golden ears and meter readers: The contest for epistemic authority in Audiophilia". Social Studies of Science. 34 (5): 783. doi:10.1177/0306312704047613. S2CID 146545243.
^van der Veen, M. (2005). "Universal system and output transformer for valve amplifiers" (PDF). 118th AES Convention, Barcelona, Spain.
^O'Connell, Joseph (January 1992). "The Fine-Tuning of a Golden Ear: High-End Audio and the Evolutionary Model of Technology". Technology and Culture. 33 (1). Society for the History of Technology: 1–37. doi:10.2307/3105807. ISSN 0040-165X. JSTOR 3105807.
^"Lost in music: the world of obsessive audiophilia". The Guardian. 29 November 2015. Retrieved 20 December 2020.
^Hutchinson, Lee (30 July 2015). "The audiophile's dilemma: strangers can't identify $340 cables, either [Updated]". Ars Technica. Retrieved 20 December 2020.
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