The Audiophile Trap
Photography, birds, and synthesizers/recording music are the hobbies you’ll most often find me talking about or dabbling in but there’s one that precedes all of them. Listening to music has been one of my passions since I was in high school. When I was 13 I discovered Pink Floyd and Led Zepellin and there was no turning back. In the early days my listening options were a boom box that sat next to my study desk and my dad’s Sansui music system. When I was in IIT-Bombay I had a nice used “hifi” system with some custom built speakers and when I moved to the US the first thing I bought was a Technics system.
While I have a fairly high end home studio setup with a pair of Adams (and an Adam subwoofer) connected to a Focurite Scarlett 18i20 audio interface, for my music listening I have leaned towards convenience over the best quality. In 2014 I invested in a Sonos 5.1 home theater system that also functioned as a music system and added a pair of Sonos Play:5’s that sat as a stereo pair in the living room. The lack of cables was a huge attraction. Since then I added a nice Audio Technica turntable (a birthday gift actually) but for the most part listening has been on the Sonos system, the many Echo speakers around the house and Apple Airpods. Over the last year though I’ve had a bit of a music revival with more exploration and ended up with a Tidal subscription in addition to an existing Spotify one to take advantage of the higher quality audio. More recently I added Roon to my setup to combine my CD collection and Tidal. I am a fan of the UX
High end audio systems have always been a bit of a conundrum for me. I appreciate high quality sound, but also know that convenience trumps that slightly better audio experience all the time. That’s not helped by all the snake oil that’s peddled in the high end audio world where some of the language and discussion ends up with a multitude of eye rolls. For years that world had been kept at an arms length, and I’ve focused on incremental improvements to the existing system (e.g. replacing the Sonos Connect:Amp with the Sonos Amp (more on that later) and upgrading to the newer Sonos Five’s for the living room. Recently I got a chance to listen to a speaker system I’ve always wanted to listen to, Magnepans. And the sound was wonderful. So wonderful that I ended up ordering a pair or Magnepan LRS+ speakers after reading some reviews (part of the reason I got the Sonos Amp was that they should be able to drive the LRS+). It will be another 3-4 months before the Maggies show up but they count as my first true audiophile purchase since college (not counting my recording gear). I also ended up investing in a dongle DAC and a pair of Focal end open-backed headphones. The Airpods Pro 2 are great but I’ve never been a fan of the Airpods Max, so getting a set of wired headphones for late night or early morning listening was something I’d been thinking about. I also ended up ordering a streaming player/headphone to pair with the Focal headphones (a Naim Uniti Atom Headphone Edition). The Roon integration and the pre-amp capabilities were what put me over the edge on this one.
That’s quite a bit of upgrading in a short period of time, which is how I roll every few years. Still a practical system that integrates a pair of high end stereo speaks with a multi-room Sonos system and upgraded headphones for late night/early morning listening. Upgraded my amps (let’s see how the Sonos Amp holds up). So, most definitely fell into the audiophile trap I’ve avoided for a very long time. The one thing I am not doing is moving away from the convenience of Sonos or investing in $1000 speaker cables.
