In the studio, it is about concealing. Removing the annoyances, leaving what the artist, engineer and producers want. In the home arena for these people, it's about revealing. I view these people the same way I view model railway and fishing folk. Well meaning, clearly happy with what they do and willing to spend vast amounts of money on a hobby. Hobby's do this to you. In fact, we do the same when we talk guitars, or other 'enhancing' devices - in particular, pre-amps and interfaces, so we are not immune to it.
What really does annoy me is that the less well informed get suckered, PT Barnum style, all the time. The thing above about the speaker cables and fuses. Hi-Fi folk take a bit of genuine physic and mangle it. The gold plated fuses that make huge differences, but they ignore half a mile buried aluminium cable going to the local substation. Maths wise - the contribution of the home wiring is tiny, and an inch of fuse unmeasurable and undetectable. Not to their ears, of course. They're been systematically ripped off.
For a moment, forget the recording chain. Forget our usual microphones. Select a mic and select the device that converts it to digital. We could choose something like an early Neumann with tubes - but let's not. The most transparent microphone would be the one with the least components that could be distorted in some way. A ribbon. A wiggling bit of metal, a magnet and a transformer. Dynamics have more moving parts - membranes connected to coils that have supports, so more complicated. Condensers have electronics, so the ribbon mic is the purest we have. Let us ignore all the popular preamps and visit a laboratory who have preamps capable of having gain, but almost undetectable levels of distortion. THAT is the 'best' quality. We do the recording in a desert, on a day with no wind, and nothing in every direction for 100 miles. We now have the purest chain possible. Would the hifi community be able to make it better in any measurable way? To them, yes - but how about us?
Frankly, I think audiophiles are loonies. Deluded at the extremes, just a bit odd at the mainstream. However, they're happy. We will never agree on the outrageous claims, but we could say the same about great painters. I can understand paintings that look real - but I struggle with impressionists and as for the weird stuff, I don't get it at all.
I look at those listening room images and laugh. I listened to the monitoring system that the Beatles used to record some ground breaking stuff. They sounded terrible by current standards. When the hifi brigade listen to the recording, it's not remotely what the Abbey Road people were hearing, and creating on. Thus, I feel the hifi people are interested in revealing.
