Geek: Amplification
Guitarists are snobs, but our snobbery is a mere fraction of the nuttiness of the audiophile ecosystem. The myths are sticky, but real data and tests are good at busting them.
I know this might be a surprise, but I am a guitar player. And I have been turning money into noise for over 4 decades at this point.
And, as a player in the 1980's the "manna from Heaven" was the "tube" amp. As in a class A amp that used 1930's vintage vacuum tubes to amplify the signal. And virtually all tube guitar amps use a circuit designed by RCA in the 1920's for the power amp. That was a fucking century ago!
It was "accepted truth" that tube amps were smoother, warmer, and more pleasing to the ears. And even better was to find a 1960s vintage Marshall "Plexi" or Vox AC30, or Fender amp for the most goodness.
It was all bullshit. Still, I spent a LOT of $$$ chasing that magic sound.
But if you think guitar players are nuts about the provenance of their "tone"[1]. Audiophiles are far far worse. These are people who will buy knobs for their gear made out of various hardwoods to alter the tone and warmness of the sound, will buy special copper cabling that has specific "oxygen" matrixed in the metal to enhance the conductance.
And that is merely scratching the surface.
Today, I stumbled across this video, targeted at the audiophile crowd, that busts the myth, and that class A amps can be matched or exceeded by the AB and D classes, all are indistinguishable if you control for signal source, output level, and identical listening conditions.
Watching these snobs have to admit that a low power, highly efficient class D amp is identical in performance to the power gobbling room-heating, class A amp that they all worship as the audio God.
