This is the first in a series of posts about my realization that I have become an audiophile.

Introduction

I have realized recently that I have slowly but surely slipped from the category of “normal person” to the category of “audiophile”. I never would call myself an audiophile before, so this is somewhat shocking to me.

I always thought that audiophiles were people who threw away thousands of dollars, unnecessarily, on audio equipment–speakers, headphones, DACs, and so on—to “hear” “something” that I could never, ever hear myself, and was probably not even there. After realizing that I spent, probably, $1,000 or more on audio equipment last year, I think I need to brand myself with the “audiophile” label. I am listening to lots of music and enjoying it immensely, but there is something clearly wrong with me. (Just kidding—I think.)

A princely four-figure sum over the course of 2017 netted me some great equipment:

  1. Apple AirPods
  2. Oppo PM3 headphones
  3. an Oppo HA-2SE DAC/headphone amp combo, and
  4. a BeoPlay M3 wireless speaker.

Even with all that great stuff at my listening desk, I am still dying to buy a HomePod (or two, even), open-back headphones from HifiMan, B&O Play headphones of some kind (did they just discontinue all their wired models?), and maybe a HifiBerry or a piece of Schiit to turn one of my old Raspberry Pis back into an AirPlay receiver.

I have no idea why this is. All I know is that the good audio equipment I have now has made all the other speakers in the house sound like garbage to me. In a way, I am glad I don’t have the money right now to buy any of this stuff. I certainly don’t need any of it, and it won’t make my life any better.

What the hell happened?

How did I slip from being a normal music listener to an audiophile or audiophile wannabe? I have a very good excuse—or, more likely, a series of somewhat poor excuses that snowballed into $1,000+ of spending on audio equipment in one year:

  1. I adore listening to music, and spend a lot of time doing so.
  2. I got, for free a couple times, better headphones than the ones I had before.
  3. I started to hear “something” that these better headphones brought out of my music that I never had heard before. The sound of the music became as important to me as the content of the music.
  4. And then, those headphones broke, and I had to get new ones. This has happened multiple times to me over the past five years, which is a bummer and encouraged me to try to buy higher quality headphones each time.

So what?

I thought it would be fun to write about all my gear from one the years, from the first crappy boombox to the amazing headphones and DAV/amp combo I am rocking these days. This is the first post in that series.