The Rational Audiophile

Part 1 aka intro of a series

Okay, okay, I agree. The Rational Audiophile, there might be no such thing. Perhaps it’s a more elusive beast than the Bigfoot or the Yeti. And even before this post went live, I have been laughed out of the room (twice!!) for putting these two oxymoronic words together.

Copper Wire vs Plunge Saw, which would you choose for $400

Recently, I sold an Acoustic Revive interconnect — a teflon-jacketed copper wire — the cheapest component in my Audiophile hobby, to fund the most expensive purchase of my other hobby — a Makita SP6000 165mm, 1300W Plunge Cut Saw, a tour-de-force Japanese power tool with a 1300W motor and magnesium blades that cuts wood like butter. My other interconnect — a Shindo silver wire — can fund my entire woodworking toolroom! A copper wire for a plunge-saw. Laugh away ye naysayers, who am I to say otherwise.

The “miserable” Dr House

Pure unadulterated rationality does not beget happiness. Everyone knows that. For those in doubt, please binge-watch a season or two of my favourite TV show, House MD.

But for those of us in the Audiophile Merry-go-round ensconced in our listening chairs staring at their shiny new amplifier — the one that was CNC-ed out of a single 100-lb block of aircraft-grade aluminium and ornamented and finished like a Swiss watch and highly acclaimed by all the audiophile gurus — and wondering in shock, disappointment, and dismay, on why we blew our bank account on purchase of this toy in the first place, and thinking furiously about how and when to list it for sale at a 40% loss on Audiogon — a little injection of rationality perhaps might bring a ten-fold increase in happiness in our crazy little world of audiophilia.

From L to R: "Milled from a 150lb of aluminium", "... built like a Swiss watch", "... power dial inspired by the famous Parisian watchmaker Abraham Louis Breguet in the 1770's"

The Psychology of Decision-making: I remember reading a lot of popular books on this topic in my late twenties — a self-improvement phase of my life — right around or after the 2009 financial crisis.

How we decide, By Jonathan Lehrer. Blink and Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell. Fooled by Randomness and Black Swan and The Bed of Procrustes, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Paradox of Choice etc etc etc. I literally OD-ed on self-improvement books of that era.

The one learning that stuck in my thick skull was that we have two decision systems, the Intuitional Super-computer for big complex decision (Whom to marry?), and the Abacus-like-frontal-lobe aka the thinker for smaller decision (What TV to buy?) … and after that, “I know it all,” I said, and moved on to the much more interesting world of literary fiction.

And in that moment of silliness and hubris, sunk deep in the whirlpool of Audiophilia buy-sell merry-go-round chronicled in my previous post, I missed out the most important intellectual event of 2011-12, the release of Daniel Kahneman’s seminal Thinking, Fast and Slow.

Well, its 2024, I am reading this book almost a decade and a half too late, bemoaning all the mediocre, bad, terrible, and disastrous decisions that I have made in Audiophilia (and less importantly in life) whilst knee-deep in cognitive terms like Confirmation Bias, Halo Effect, Duration Neglect, Affect Heuristic, Sunk Cost Fallacy, Availability Heuristic, Substitution Heuristic etc etc etc. But, hey, I am not kicking myself too hard because that would be in the words of Mr Daniel Kahneman, indulging in Hindsight Bias. Or as the folklore wisdom states “Hindsight is 20/20”.

One book to rule them all.

But it’s been fun applying this new-found wisdom to post-mortem my audiophile decision making and those of my fellow audiophiles in real life, in forums, in audio shows, in audio magazines reviews, user reviews, forum wars, forum troll wars and flames, and audiophile announcements. In doing so, I am indulging in a version of what Mr Rolf Dobelli — author of The Art of Thinking Clearly and the intellectual heir of Mr Kahneman — would call Black Box thinking. The idea of incrementally improving one’s decision making prowess, one mistake at a time — like the Aircraft Black Box that has over the decades since 1954 made flying at 900 km/hr, 30000 ft in the air in a sealed aluminium cylinder safer than driving your own car.

So, on we go on this journey of Rational thinking in the Audiophile world. Being laughed off twice already, I know I stepping into a minefield. But, hey! that’s what makes it fun (and funny) — living in this nutty little Audiophile bubble filled with first world problems and epic controversies, religious wars (Tubes vs SS anyone?) and quantum physics (10000$ QSA fuse anyone?).