Talk:Audiophile

The Audiophile and his microculture

Economist John D. Branch (2007) interviewed 11 audiophiles several times between July 1998 to February 1999 and wrote a useful paper about the audiophile microculture, his paper is available on Google Books. Contributors should read his paper (and others like it) and incorporate key findings into the article. I think the article would be greatly improved and become more encyclopedic if certain sections written from a more sociological perspective, rather then from an insiders viewpoint. --Diamonddavej (talk) 21:09, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

Couldn't agree more. A casual XNG "pop culture audiophile" yields reams of citation ore. Too, it's classic technology adoption cycle (Innovators, Early Adopters, Early Majority, Late Majority, and Laggards), so let's focus on that metric. It starts emic and segues to etic...kencf0618 (talk) 15:13, 22 October 2024 (UTC)

How to cite existence of product classes?

Article says:

Audiophiles use a wide variety of accessories and fine-tuning techniques, sometimes referred to as "tweaks," to improve the sound of their systems. These include filters to clean the electricity[11], equipment racks to isolate components from floor vibrations, specialty power and audio cables, loudspeaker stands (and footers to isolate speakers from stands), and room treatments.

etc etc. This in fact true; type the product names in to a search engine, the Internet is full of ads for these things. Type the word "tweaks" in, and the usage of that word to describe weird/eccentric/counterintuitive product classes is painfully obvious. But we've got a citation-needed tag and I’m a bit puzzled about how to deal with it. Surely it’s not reasonable to use a Google/Bing search as a citation? I have looked around and totally failed to find a reputable publication that I can cite as saying "the following product classes exist", probably because it seems too obvious for anyone to say.

I'm not sure when this unsigned comment was made, but the section in question currently contains several sources. Is there something left unsourced that needs adressing? Mr. Swordfish (talk) 19:15, 8 June 2026 (UTC)

Wiki Education assignment: Reading Culture

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 18 January 2022 and 11 May 2022. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): RTThai (article contribs).

Some audiophiles upsample from the source rate to higher rates which allows different filter properties to be used.

Perhaps they do but they will not like the results since the information removed by the original filter cannot be recreated. This sounds like oR to me. Greglocock (talk) 18:46, 24 June 2025 (UTC)

@Greglocock

Upsampling is a real thing, but it's complicated. See and

I'm inclined to simply remove that sentence since it's a bit misleading and I'm not sure how to treat the subject adequately with proper sourcing. Other opinions? Mr. Swordfish (talk) 23:55, 10 June 2026 (UTC)

From your first ref "no new audio information is created by any of these products;" Exactly. The filtering side is nteresting, I might have a play with ffts. ~~~ Greglocock (talk) 00:20, 11 June 2026 (UTC)

My understanding is that by upsampling, e.g. from 44.1 khz to 88.2 khz, there's no need for a "brickwall" filter on the output and a gentler low pass filter will sound better, at least in theory. Most DACs already do this internally, so it's not just "audiophiles" who engage in upsampling, it's just how modern DACs are designed.

Now, some people will do additional upsampling thinking that it will make an audible difference, but I'm unaware of any evidence that it does. So, my take is that upsampling is both a standard engineering practice and also an audiophile "tweak". I'm not sure how to present this with properly sourced material, and maybe I'm wrong about it. As I said above, I'm inclined to just remove that sentence and move on. Mr. Swordfish (talk) 01:46, 11 June 2026 (UTC)

Community section

This section of the article is poorly sourced and probably incorrect. It would seem to be an improvement to simply delete that section. Other opinions? Mr. Swordfish (talk) 02:46, 8 June 2026 (UTC)

It's been a few days and nobody is sticking up for this section so I'm going to remove it. Mr. Swordfish (talk) 00:12, 13 June 2026 (UTC)