Since I started this blog, I've used the tagline "A 'more objective' take for Audiophiles" (later adding the word Rational). This was intentional because back in the early 2010s, the environment was quite different than today. At that time, computer audiophilia was primarily about playback of local music libraries on hard drives (collapse of NAND flash drive prices for SSD in mid-2012 soon allowed 500+GB SSDs), prior to the massive expansion of online streamed audio (Spotify launched in mid 2011 in N. America, lossless Tidal not until late 2014). In those days, we also didn't have anything like the expansive high-fidelity "Chi-Fi" hardware options we have today. These products have tremendously brought down the cost of literally everything in the audio chain. While DACs have been high performance devices for ages already (some history here), others like reasonably priced Class D amps (Hypex UcD launched 2003, nCore 2011, very inexpensive TI TPA32xx "chip" amps by 2016) came out later, and today are ubiquitous (like this, and this, and this). The availability of Raspberry Pi and similar devices have made bit-perfect digital end-points easy and cheap to build. These products have commoditized high fidelity in ways I think should be welcomed by all audiophiles.
Not only has availability of hardware changed (and concomitantly necessary software), but I'm glad to see that in the last decade, the modern audiophile who's getting started in this hobby now has easy access on the web to a lot of information including better objective analyses and subjective opinions/preferences. I think the environment today is a much better mix of technological understanding that can be used to quite easily refute nonsensical mysticism while at the same time rationally discuss human subjective preferences.
Compared to the early 2010's, the media landscape has changed so significantly from what used to be mostly unchallenged narratives driven by the old "magazines of record" like Stereophile and The Absolute Sound; nowadays these sites have sheltered themselves with no discussion forums to leave comments on, and even old comments accumulated over years have been purged (changes as recent as 2025)! As far as I can tell, the magazines these days have little ability to offer deep insights beyond articles acting as proxy advertisements.
With these changes, the "more objective" part of my tagline I think has already become much of mainstream audiophile discourse and culture. And so I was contemplating the other day whether we're already at a comfortable balance now between subjectivity and objectivity among hobbyists.
As humans, it seems like balance is one of the hardest things to achieve. I see audiophilia as a safe microcosm to view other aspects of life like politics. As in politics, it's all too easy to be drawn to extremes. In fact, the modern liberal freedoms we enjoy and the progress we've made have been based on the "dynamic equilibrium" as a central defining pillar. For us audiophiles, balance likewise is a necessary foundation to satisfy questions surrounding what devices we buy and also why we choose the audiophile hobby as our area of interest in the first place.
