One of my favorite audio reviewers recently went on a bit of a tear on YouTube about the difference between an audiophile and an audio enthusiast, and because I apparently can’t hear an interesting argument without turning it over in my head for the next several days, I’ve been thinking about it ever since.
The funny thing is, I understood where he was coming from. I didn’t necessarily agree with where the line was drawn, but the distinction itself made sense.
There are people in this hobby pursuing something very specific: fidelity. They dream of hearing their favorite music as close as possible to how the artist, producer, and engineers intended it to sound. They want their equipment to disappear, leaving as little as possible between them and the recording. No added bass lumbering through the mix like a kaiju looking for downtown Tokyo. No extra sparkle. No intentional coloration. Just the recording reproduced as faithfully as possible.
I respect the hell out of that pursuit. There’s something almost romantic about assembling a system that gets out of the way and lets the music speak for itself.
I’ve always wondered about one part of the “artist’s intent” argument, though: Can we ever really know what the artist intended? Unless we were sitting in the studio, listening through the same monitors, in the same room, with the artist and engineer beside us, we’re probably always chasing that intent from a distance.
Even if I somehow got invited into that studio, I’d probably be the guy quietly wondering what would happen if we added 2 dB of bass.
And that’s where the other side of this conversation gets interesting, because some of us have spent our entire lives messing with stuff.
I Was Never Going to Leave the EQ Alone
I grew up with boomboxes, stereo systems, bass-boost buttons, and graphic equalizers. If there were sliders on the front of something, you moved them. That was half the fun. Nobody handed teenage me a frequency-response graph and asked whether my stereo was faithfully reproducing the mastering engineer’s intentions. I was trying to figure out which combination of sliders made the bass hit harder without turning everything else into sonic oatmeal.
Apparently, I never grew out of it.
Actually, the more I think about it, the more I realize this has never really been an audio thing for me. Give me a camera, computer, headphones, or pretty much any piece of technology, and eventually I’m going to start messing with it. I’ll change settings, swap something, add accessories, customize controls, rearrange the setup, and generally keep tinkering until the thing doesn’t simply work the way it came out of the box. It works the way I want it to work.
I’ve always enjoyed making technology mine, and maybe that’s one reason I connect so strongly with what Zach and Bevin are creating at ZMF Headphones. Their headphones almost invite that relationship.
The woods, finishes, pads, and other choices make personalization part of the experience. You can experiment, change things, and build something that feels distinctly yours. For someone whose first instinct when encountering a piece of technology is, “I wonder what happens if I change this,” that’s catnip.
I don’t modify things because I assume the person who designed them got something wrong. I do it because experimentation is part of how I enjoy technology. That’s been true with cameras and computers, and it’s definitely true with audio. The boombox eventually became DACs, amps, headphones, IEMs, ear tips, filters, PEQ, and enough cables around the GearZilla lair to qualify as an OSHA concern, but the instinct behind it all hasn’t changed.
That also means I don’t necessarily want every piece of equipment to make my favorite music sound exactly the same.
I’ve heard some of these songs hundreds of times over decades. What keeps this hobby fascinating is discovering that I still haven’t heard everything those recordings have to offer.
Different headphones can change the sense of space in a recording. An IEM can bring a vocal forward in a way I hadn’t experienced before. A warmer source can give an old album a completely different character, while a more resolving setup can reveal tiny background details that have apparently been sitting there for 20 years, waiting for me to notice them.
Sometimes I want more bass. Sometimes I want more air and sparkle. Sometimes I want the vocals lifted and floating in front of me. Sometimes I want warmth and texture, and sometimes I want enough detail to hear the drummer regret his career choices.
Am I always hearing the music exactly as the artist intended? Probably not.
But I’m hearing music I love in ways I haven’t heard it before, and that’s a huge part of why I love this hobby.
Loving Gear Doesn’t Mean Loving Music Less
This is where the audiophile-versus-audio-enthusiast distinction starts to lose me, because sometimes we talk about being fascinated by equipment and being passionate about music as though one somehow subtracts from the other. In my experience, it’s been exactly the opposite.
I’ll happily admit that I love gear. My office provides enough evidence that no jury would require further testimony. I love trying new IEMs, comparing DACs, changing ear tips, messing with PEQ, and connecting equipment in combinations that probably cause an electrical engineer somewhere to wake suddenly in a cold sweat. But all that experimentation keeps sending me back to the same place: the music.
The gear has made me revisit albums I’ve heard dozens of times. It’s made me listen more carefully to background vocals, textures, instrument placement, depth, and little production choices I’d never consciously noticed before. It’s made familiar songs feel unfamiliar again, which is a pretty remarkable trick when you’ve been listening to some of them most of your life.
The gear didn’t pull me away from music. It gave me another way into it.
Maybe that’s a better way to understand these different approaches. One listener may be primarily pursuing reproduction, trying to hear the recording as faithfully as possible. Another may be pursuing exploration, wondering what different equipment can reveal, emphasize or simply make more enjoyable. Most of us probably bounce between the two depending on the day, the song, and our mood.
Those don’t strike me as opposing philosophies. They strike me as different expressions of the same curiosity about sound.
We Don’t All Have to Review Audio the Same Way
That same difference shows up in reviewing, and I’m perfectly comfortable admitting where I fit.
Nobody is coming to GearZilla for laboratory analysis. I’m not an electrical engineer or an acoustic engineer, and I don’t have a scientific approach to reviewing audio equipment. I’m a storyteller who somehow became a gear-chasing kaiju with an alarming number of IEMs.
I listen to music I know. I change sources, swap tips, experiment with settings, and compare gear. I pay attention to vocals, instruments, texture, space, depth, placement, and separation, then I try to describe that experience in a way that helps someone else understand what happened when I pressed play. That’s my lane, and I love it.
Then you’ve got reviewers like the crew at Headphones.com who can approach some of this equipment from a far more technical and measurement-driven perspective. They have expertise I don’t possess, and that’s precisely why I enjoy listening to them. I can learn something about the science behind what I’m experiencing while still approaching the experience itself from my own perspective.
Our review styles can look radically different, even though our audiences are not nearly as different as we imagine. Someone reading one of my reviews might absolutely want to pull up measurements afterward. Someone studying those measurements may still want to hear another reviewer describe whether they actually enjoyed listening to the headphones.
One perspective can help explain why something may be happening, another can describe what it feels like when it happens, and the reader gets to decide which information matters to them.
I don’t see that diversity as a weakness in audio reviewing. I think it’s one of its greatest strengths.
And if you really want to see how artificial some of these divisions can become, go to CanJam.
CanJam Is Where the Labels Get Weird
If there’s one place that makes the whole audiophile-versus-audio-enthusiast debate feel a little silly, it’s CanJam.
Walk around CanJam, or almost any big audio show, and all these supposedly different corners of the hobby are suddenly piled into the same rooms. You’ve got engineers discussing measurements while someone five feet away is trying an IEM because they thought the faceplate looked cool. There are people carrying portable rigs worth thousands of dollars standing next to someone trying their first genuinely great pair of headphones. Reviewers compare notes, manufacturers explain technology, collectors show each other gear, and somebody inevitably sits down, closes their eyes, and disappears for five minutes because whatever they’re hearing just transported them somewhere else.
At CanJam SoCal, I had the chance to have dinner with Dr. Fang Bian and his HiFiMAN team, along with several reviewers whose work I greatly respect. Of course we talked about headphones and audio, but we also talked about family, kids, soccer, life, and all the things people talk about when they stop being usernames, reviewers, engineers, and company executives and simply become people sitting around a table together.
And funny enough, this very debate crept into the conversation at the table.
Here was a table filled with people who approached audio from very different directions, and sitting there with us was Dr. Fang, a bona fide scientist and engineer who has built an entire career around advancing headphone technology. Yet he’s also proud that he started out as a reviewer and an audio enthusiast himself.
So when the conversation drifted toward the distinctions among audiophiles, enthusiasts, reviewers, and the different ways people approach the hobby, Fang didn’t seem particularly interested in building walls between them.
His response was:
“Everyone is welcome.”
I loved that.
Not because it settles the debate. I’m not sure the debate needs to be settled. I loved it because it came from someone who could probably make a stronger argument than most of us for drawing technical distinctions. He has the scientific background. He’s a tinkerer. He’s spent years developing the equipment the rest of us sit around arguing about on the internet.
And yet, sitting around that dinner table, the distinction didn’t seem nearly as important as the thing that had brought everyone there.
A shared love of audio.
That’s what I keep coming back to when I think about CanJam. The categories that can seem incredibly important online become much less interesting when we’re actually standing next to each other. The person studying measurements is sitting beside the person listening completely subjectively. The reviewer who can explain the engineering is talking with the reviewer who’s trying to explain why a vocal just gave them goosebumps. Someone wants absolute neutrality, while the guy next to them is already wondering what those headphones would sound like with different pads.
Then somebody hands somebody else a pair of headphones.
“You’ve got to hear this.”
That’s it.
That’s the moment when all the terminology gets stripped away.
It’s also why I love audio shows so much. The internet gives us labels. CanJam gives us chairs. You sit down, put something on your head, and listen. Maybe you want to see the measurements afterward. Maybe you want to know what driver is inside. Maybe you’re already mentally calculating how many other pieces of gear you’d have to sell before your spouse notices this one arriving at the house.
Whatever brought you to that chair, you’re there because you’re curious about what you’re about to hear.
And if a bona fide scientist, businessman, manufacturer, former reviewer, and lifelong audio enthusiast can look around that table and essentially say, “Everyone is welcome,” that’s a version of this hobby I can get behind.
Somewhere Along the Way, We All Started Chasing Something
Think about the first piece of audio gear that really got your attention. Maybe it was a pair of headphones, an IEM, a stereo system, or something completely different. You heard separation between instruments that hadn’t been there before. A bass line suddenly had texture. A vocal occupied its own space. You noticed something buried in a song you’d heard countless times and thought, “Wait, that was always there?”
You probably didn’t immediately wonder whether that made you an audiophile or an audio enthusiast.
You wanted to hear more.
Then you discovered DACs. Then amps. Then balanced connections, ear tips, and PEQ. Eventually somebody mentioned R2R, and six months later you found yourself explaining to your spouse why another package had arrived from Shenzhen.
Curiosity became exploration. Exploration became knowledge. Knowledge changed the way you listened.
Some people take that journey much further into the science and engineering. Some go deep into collecting and experimentation. Some chase the most transparent system they can build, while others accumulate enough headphones to equip a very small orchestra, because each one offers something different.
None of that bothers me.
What bothers me is when a useful description becomes an identity we feel obligated to protect. That’s when we start establishing qualifications, deciding what counts and eventually, whether we mean to or not, deciding who counts.
There’s plenty of room to recognize expertise without turning expertise into admission. Someone who has spent decades studying acoustics and audio engineering knows things I don’t know, and I respect that enormously. That doesn’t make my curiosity less legitimate, just as my love of experimenting with gear doesn’t mean I care less about the music coming through it.
You don’t need to understand every component inside a DAC to be fascinated by what you’re hearing through it. You don’t need a wall of headphones to love headphones. You don’t need to understand a frequency-response graph to recognize that an IEM’s treble is attempting to remove your eyebrows.
There’s room for all of it.
🦖 Final Roar
So am I an audiophile or an audio enthusiast? I genuinely don’t know, and the more I think about it, the less interested I am in choosing.
I’m absolutely an audio enthusiast. I love equipment, technology, and experimentation. I love changing things and discovering what happens next. I grew up touching the EQ, and apparently I’m going to keep touching the EQ until someone physically removes the sliders from my hands.
But I also love sitting in the dark with a great pair of headphones and disappearing into an album. Sometimes I’m analyzing, sometimes I’m reviewing, and sometimes I’m swapping DACs like a kaiju who’s just discovered USB-C. Then the right song comes on, and the reviewer part of my brain finally shuts up. I’m not thinking about drivers, architecture, measurements, or frequency response anymore.
I’m just listening.
Maybe that’s why this whole debate strikes me as oddly familiar. Human beings have spent much of history arguing over labels and the “right” way to practice things we fundamentally share. Religion might be the ultimate example. People can worship differently, follow different traditions, and interpret things differently while sometimes directing that devotion toward the same God. We’ve managed to turn those differences into divisions serious enough that actual blood has been shed over them.
So, for real, can we please not do that with headphones?
Obviously nobody is launching a holy war over planar magnetics versus dynamic drivers, although I’ve read a few forum threads that appeared headed in that direction. But the underlying human impulse is recognizable. We create categories and tribes to explain differences, then sometimes become so attached to them that we forget how much common ground existed before we drew the lines.
Audiophile. Audio enthusiast. Objectivist. Subjectivist. Measurement-first. Listening-first. Neutrality. EQ. Tubes. Solid state. R2R. Delta-sigma. “As the artist intended.” “Give me three more dB of bass.”
At some point you have to laugh.
We’re all sitting around putting tiny speakers in, on, or around our ears because we love what happens when somebody presses play.
Some people dream of hearing their favorite music exactly as the artist intended, or at least getting as close to that elusive goal as their equipment allows. Others grew up with boomboxes and EQ sliders and still want to know what happens when we change something. Plenty of us live somewhere between the two, depending on the music, the gear, and probably what mood we’re in that night.
None of those approaches needs to win.
All this gear chasing certainly hasn’t made me care less about music. It’s done exactly the opposite. The gear has helped me hear music I love in new ways. It’s made old songs feel new again, made me notice things I’d missed, and made me more curious about recordings I’ve spent my life listening to.
Maybe you’re chasing absolute graph-sniffing fidelity while I’m moving the EQ before the first chorus. Maybe you want your headphones exactly as their designer created them while I’m researching replacement pads before the delivery truck has made it out of my neighborhood. Maybe you want to see measurements before you listen, while I’m already three songs deep trying to figure out why the vocals suddenly sound like they’re floating six feet in front of me.
That’s fine.
We’re probably more alike than we think.
CanJam SoCal certainly reminded me of that. Put all these supposedly different tribes into the same building, and eventually we’re sitting at the same tables, listening to the same gear and passing headphones back and forth. Nobody checks your audiophile credentials at the door. As Dr. Fang essentially put it when this very debate came up over dinner: everyone is welcome.
I love that.
And with CanJam Dallas coming up, maybe that’s as complicated as this needs to be. Let’s leave the Great Audiophile Zealot War on the internet where it belongs. No doctrinal disputes over EQ. No excommunications for bass shelves. No schisms over measurements. And absolutely no bloodshed over whether changing pads violates the sacred intentions of the headphone designer.
CanJam Dallas is neutral territory.
Bring your graphs. Bring your golden ears. Bring your reference tracks, your ridiculous portable stack, your $30 IEMs and your $3,000 headphones. Bring whatever makes this hobby fun for you.
Then pull up a chair.
Because sooner or later, somebody is going to hand you something, smile, and say:
“You’ve got to hear this.”
And for those few minutes, nobody is an audiophile or an audio enthusiast.
We’re just people listening to music.
That’s the hobby I want.
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