Slate.com has published an elegantly written, accessible and on-point manifesto in defense of audiophilia. Fred Kaplan writes of his conversion moment, many years ago:
The difference between the mass-market stereos I'd been hearing up to then and the high-end gear I heard now was the difference between bodega swill and Lafite-Rothschild, between a museum-shop poster and an oil painting, between watching a porn film and having sex.
There is, no question about it, a whole realm of ostentatious audiophile geekdom that is over-the-top and irrelevant to the concerned music fan. I wouldn't buy thousand-dollar-per-yard speaker cable if I had Bill Gates's fortune. But there comes a time in any music fan's life (and I'd like that to be everybody) when they should feel good about investing in a set of devices that can reproduce sound with the same clarity and accuracy we ask every day of things that we apprehend with our vision. I was having this discussion with a music industry friend just last night who argued he's more concerned with convenience than precision in the reproduction of music. He's usually listening on the go, through his iPod. As Kaplan argues, that's swell for some times and places, but for him and for me, those moments when we can sit and bask in the details of great musical art - the breath and the fingers and the nuances of the wood and metal that make up the instruments - are what we most look forward to. These days you can assemble a breathtaking system for less than $3,000, and if you were a pianist you'd be looking at a lot more than that for just your instrument. Spread out over many years of service and thousands of meaningful listening experiences, it's really not that much.
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