Is there room in your paradigm for an audiophile 1.5? Someone who buys the $2000 pre-amp but knows full-well that interconnects are snake-oil; someone who knows that spending more than $1000 per separate will not be worth the money unless you have a dedecated listening room with accoustic panelling.

There is definitely a room in my paradigm for this category. There is room in my heart. This is who I aspire to be, if I ever feel like getting more serious about music. What I don't have, however, is the right term for this type of person. I just don't think they'll call themselves audiophile - they wouldn't want others to confuse them with the other "audiophiles" - i.e. the philistines (1) and the crackpots (2).

I agree with this. I consider myself a person who is very interested in a quality music-listening experience in that I want it to sound good (I can't believe how many people listen to music out of their phone's speaker these days) and I want a high degree of control/convenience out of my music player (mostly oriented around playing entire albums and/or dynamically building playlists on the fly based on where the mood takes me). But I really don't want to be called an audiophile, because of the crazy pseudoscientific baggage that word carries. So for a product to label itself "for audiophiles" creates a little "ugh, poor choice" flinch in me.

Even then, $1000 is very unlikely to be a meaningful investment.

The hard upper limit is the equipment the mastering engineer used to listen to the track when mastering it. Even if your equipment can reproduce more detail, that's likely unwanted detail.

Something you'll frequently notice when listening to youtube shorts on a big home theater setup – a lot of wind noise below 80Hz which the author couldn’t notice, but which is deafening. The same, though more subtle, happens when listening to professionally mastered audio with an excessive audiophile setup.

That's definitely true! This, I think, is the major misunderstanding about HiFi - high fidelity means highly faithful, i.e. the equipment is designed to create a faithful reproduction, and not to needlessly embellish.

If the track you are listening to was recorded in some teenager's bedroom on a crappy cassette deck, then it should sound as such. This is equally as important as being able to pick out the detail on a track that has been produced with all the latest state of the art equipment.

Music is fundamentally about communication of emotion that transcends language and the purpose of a good HiFi is to facilitate that communication.

However, when it comes to consuming things like video content, particularly that made for youtube, tiktok, etc. then it is probably unfaithful to even attempt to listen to it on a high-end system, just as you say. It's like eating MacDonald's in a michelin starred restaurant or scranning gourmee steak from a takeaway container while drunk on a street corner at three in the morning: context matters.

See also: https://hard-drive.net/hd/entertainment/100-gecs-song-blasti...