The love of anything can tie a group of people together. With my most recent infatuation with excellent-sounding audio, I immersed myself in a community of like-minded individuals. The audiofools are a little more obsessed with the pursuit of perfect sound reproduction than I, but share that same drive to make their respective systems as nice as possible. with budgets ranging from a couple hundred bucks to tens of thousands of dollars, some (like myself) hunt down bargains that lean toward vintage fixer-uppers, while others spend more on cables than I have invested in my entire system. I simply wanted to have a retro stereo for the cool factor, but have been sucked into "chasing the dragon" in my search for sound.
My favorite community watering hole is the internet forum Audiokarma.org, where advice and knowledge are freely bantered about. I also frequent the local high-end audio store, Reference Media, as the sales staff are more than enthusiastic to have me listen to $30,000 speakers though the staff understand I could never spend that kind of dough on speakers.
Not surprisingly, there are differences of opinion which sometimes get out of control as audio quality is pretty subjective beyond a certain point. I've even heard many a heated debate about which multi-hundred dollar RCA cable "sounds better" than the other, though I can't hear a difference between a $15 cable and a $200 one. Despite these arguments, everyone seems to get along and respect others' gear. After all, at the end of the day, aren't we all just taking different roads to Chicago?
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