Nice wording, but is it really credible in your case? I perceived you differently with your undeniably sound musical knowledge and skills.
Credible is for you to decide. I argue it's consistent with my other contributions here.
My interest in audio gear is mostly utilitarian. Think of the difference between
decorative and
utilitarian ceramics. The bowl in which you stir your cake mix can be no more than a tool, i.e. utilitarian. Or it can also be decorative and beautiful so you keep it on a shelf where you can enjoy seeing it. Or it can so decoratively fine that you never use it as a tool for fear fear of damage. These are differences of subjectivity with respect to ceramic bowls.
The market for audio equipment appears to allow a similar analysis. There are those for whom the equipment is the object of joy and pride. This is what I call audiophillia and people who practice this hobby are audiophiles. I have a number of issues with it that I think allow myself to count myself antiaudiophile.
1. It seems to me there is a coherent aesthetic that has emerged in the market for audiophile equipment and I find it repellent. It's not for me. I don't want to describe it here and refer you to the ASR threads with photos from audiophile trade shows, most of which seem jaw-droppingly freakish to me. I went to one audio show like this in the mid 1980s and that was enough.
2. The practice of audiophile listening seems perverse to me, with its optimized listening position for the arbitrary two-channel loud speakers. (Remember, I'm also the antistereophile, I like mono and deplore stereo as at best a con and often actually evil.) I can sit still at a concert but listening to records there's nothing happening to look at and I easily get restless. The Maxell man in his Le Corbusier club chair is a useful icon of this practice that doesn't appeal to me. He looks lonely too.
3. I have a large collection of recordings, many of which I love, but I'm also critical of the antisocial nature of recorded music. I believe in the spiritual powers in the social practice of music making and because of that I resent the objectification of music, either by recording and the heavy commercialization thereof or by turning music into high and/or remote art. The audiophile focus on investing in ever better reproduction of recorded objects seems another misdirected effort or it represents an unfortunate downstream effect of the way recording domineers music in our time.
Against all these negatives, I recognize that audio reproduction involves a tricky collection of engineering problems and I admire good engineering. I am cursed to be able to hear some defects in audio reproduction and sometimes they annoy me. If I hear defects in my everyday listening that I can control then I want to fix them. It turns out that getting good sound in our large living room requires non-trivial loudspeakers, which in turn make requirements on amplification. I found ASR in I believe 2018 or 19 while I was struggling and increasingly frustrated with the BS and technical confusion in the market. My desktop system has been Genelec 1029A going on 20 years and despite ASR it hasn't changed. These systems are now serving their purposes quite well. For me, upgrades are about debugging, fixing problems I can hear.
Hence
pagmatic antiaudiophile. A
fundamentalist antiaudiophile would probably not be able to justify/rationalize our loud speakers.
Since I'm a live-and-let-live kind of person, my antiaudiophilia doesn't involve active opposition to those who enjoy audio reproduction equipment as a decorative art (in the sense I gave at the start of this post). It's just not for me as a lifestyle or hobby for the reasons I gave above. You are an example of someone with both a music hobby and an audiophile hobby. Your minimalist vaccum tube amps and fancy-looking speakers seem to me esoteric and I can imagine the fun in that as I can, for example, in someone who studies and practices Babylonian astrology.
Why declare myself antiaudiophile at all? Idk. Probably because I'm on ASR and wanted to write something mildly amusing that might provoke interesting discussion. And why am I on ASR when I'm not in the market for any upgrades or to set up new systems? That's a very good question. What do you think?