The world of audio is vast and unique. Those who venture into other parts of it can be quickly overcome with confusion in regards to how to "hear" it. More so for new audiophiles. Coming from the generation where audio quality is an afterthought, you might not know how to present yourself to those who are knowledgeable and have long-time experience with high-end audio. This guide is here to help you with the very basics of how to gauge audio, what to look for when buying equipment, and how to approach this vast world.

Note: This blog post will be focusing on headphones as the "audio equipment" due to the lack of consumers who purchase full music systems. Also, this is merely my opinion and theory and does not necessarily represent all consumers and audiophiles and you are free to disagree as strongly as you wish towards this blog post.

            As audiophiles, most of us are looked at by the general public as oddities. The common consumer can't understand why we care so much about the music equipment that we purchase nor do they understand how we're able to hear a difference in the sound produced by said equipment. Equally so, us audiophiles sometimes have trouble understanding their lack of ability to hear detail in the music they listen to.

The issue is in the details that each group looks for and the content used to benchmark the quality of audio.

It's What we Look For  - Many average music listeners settle for audio equipment that we audiophiles would deem as significantly inferior in terms of sound reproduction, even if the equipment costs more than ours. The issue isn't with the correct balance of frequencies or any of the sort. They simply aren't looking for the perfectly flat response that us audiophiles are looking for. The common consumer looks for the presence of even, heavy base and extremely sharp high ends. Those would be within the frequency ranges that are most easily spotted by their ears. Without a focus on the midrange of audio (in which case their audio used to test has none), they will naturally choose to purchase audio equipment that has a good mix of bass and treble such as Beats by Dre or SYNCs or headphones by Bose. These products do not offer the good balance that us audiophiles look for but they do offer what the average consumer looks for.

It's the Music  -  When a fellow audiophile says that their audio equipment is very good, what would our first instinct as an audiophile be? Test it, of course. Now, what do we test it with? For most audiophiles, the audio of choice is going to be a classical or jazz piece which has the highest quality recordings of the instruments being played. Also, the audio should contain instruments that are representations of each of the different levels of frequency the speaker or set of headphones can produce, essentially. That's basically what many audiophiles choose (do not quote me on this as this is just through personal experience and knowledge). Now what about the common consumer? They use modern music -either electronic or electrical-instrument based- to gauge their audio. That's why we as audiophiles fail to understand them. Modern music sounds absolutely HORRIBLE on audiophile equipment mainly due to the difference in objective; our equipment focuses on reproducing audio as accurately as possible without imposing on it at all - their equipment tailors to the audio that the common consumer listens to, which means that the more the equipment imposes on the audio the better it will sound.

            Of course, audiophiles like us sometimes get frustrated when those consumers can barely tell the difference between our audio equipment and  their own, sometimes even stating that their equipment is superior in sound quality. Here's why they say that.

            Essentially, our audio is recorded with the highest quality microphones to ensure that all of the details are picked up. What about electronic songs which have swept the nation like wildfires? In many cases, they are built (and note that I said "built" and not "played") almost entirely on the computer without the use of microphones whatsoever. Even the vocals in a song (if any) are edited to compensate for the (in most cases) bad singing by using autotune or other similar pieces of software. What does this mean? Simply put, the audio generated in programs such as Ableton, Fruity Loops Studio, or Logic Pro don't create accurate sounds in the first place. They create sounds using predefined algorithms to produce audio. Our equipment was built to reproduce real recordings as accurately as possible. When playing audio produced in computer programs, our equipment fails to reproduce the audio's frequencies as the programs listed above tend to lean towards the lower end of the frequency response. On the other hand, pieces of consumer audio equipment are normally created specifically to emphasize the frequencies most commonly present in modern songs produced in those programs. That is why our equipment is "inferior" to common consumers if you were to ask the consumer to compare. In short, our equipment tries to reproduce all of the details of the audio accurately whereas their equipment tries to produce only the audio that should be present since there is virtually very little detail of audio in their pieces of music. This is also precisely why their audio equipment sounds horrendous when audiophiles use them.

            This is only a summary/theory of why audiophiles and consumers can't quite understand each others tastes in audio equipment. I have narrowed down all of the technical terms and specifications to the most basic ones that a consumer might be able to understand (as I hope common consumers will read this and try to understand audiophiles - and possibly even try to become one). Hopefully this has enlightened some people in regards to the differences in the two major audio cultures and encouraged them to be more open about it.

            Leave a comment down below on what you think of this blog post and whether or not you agree. I would love to hear what your perspective on all of this is.

About the author: James is a teenage audiophile who listens to a wide variety of music, ranging from electronic to the classics. He is open to learning new things and loves to hear different peoples' perspectives and arguments to his own statements. He cares just as much about audio as he does about technology, where technology is the center of his life.