@crashglasshouses @futurebird @bk1e It's so funny because in the pre-hi-fi days it was *really hard* to get a clean signal out of the equipment of the time. You had all kinds of induction effects and filters in places you didn't want them. It took a certain amount of painstaking polishing and refinement to get a decent sound out of a speaker.

Even ordinary people needed to de-static their records and balance their turntables and replace their needles and trace out ground loops in the cabling. And yes, good expensive kit sounded *much better* than cheap stuff.

And as technology improved, there was always some tradeoff that meant the community of "no, I'll stick with my diamond needles and gold connectors" didn't want to move over. Even red book CDs were seen as problematic. And you could point to one small area where the custom setup was better than the consumer box and justify your decisions.

And it's frustrating, because it means that I get angry at bluetooth audio being noticeably bad (as in, anyone you play the song to will go "where'd the backup vocals go?" bad), and feel like "audio playback isn't good enough" is some kind of tainted complaint to have. Like, I have a lot of patience for people who join calls with terrible microphones: how are they to know, really? But it's hard to suggest fixes without feeling like you're turning into a gold-plated crystals-on-the-wire audiophile gnome of some sort.