So what is an Audiophile? We can’t really define it in regards to the music itself. Most everyone enjoys a live event to a reproduction. So I feel that it may be impossible to define what an audiophile is without a debate on how or what equipment we use to achieve the reproduction of music.

In a similar vein, the discussion about front end vs. back end improvements of the reproduction chain is not very worthwhile because the improvement in reproduction is so highly dependent on the starting point and the goal.

No amount of front end investment will make a 2 way bookshelf speaker that is deficient in bass become a bass powerhouse, similarly the best speaker made can not fix a poor signal from the front end.

One of the reasons I got caught up in an upgrade merry-go-round was that each improvement I made, revealed a deficiency that was previously either unheard in my system or acceptable before the new piece was added. Even if you had the money a mass market system would be hard pressed to help you decide if the Burmester, Meridian or Boulder CD player had the better sound.

Conversely a $54 Best Buy CD player will make it difficult if not impossible to chose between a Dynaudio, B&W or Kharma speaker. So it seems that you must have good speakers to hear a good front end and conversely you must have a good front end to hear a good speaker. Much of the rest is sales mumbo jumbo.

All this is made worse by a deficiency in language or knowledge to describe what it is that’s missing or wrong with the reproduction chain. Yes, we all know what distortion means on a performance graph, how many of us can identify not only the amount of distortion, but whether it is even or odd harmonic by just listening?

So it turns out that every contributor to this thread seems at least partially right in their opinion.

Let me try for a definition of a true audiophile:
An Audiophile is a person who spends more than average effort in getting the best sound quality for a given environment and budget. A person who asks, how could I make this experience more faithful to live music, how can I make it better within my means than it is now?

Regarding the relationship between money and sound quality, money alone won’t do it; I have heard exotic expensive equipment not do a good job. Knowledge alone won’t do it either; room treatments might help but won’t make that $150 system sound like top of the line gear. It takes some money to buy good equipment at a given price point and some knowledge to achieve the best sound you can get for the gear that you have.

I strongly recommend a buddy system. You listen to each others gear, you swap one of your pieces of equipment for one of his and you discuss what it is you hear that's different, worse or better. Both parties profit by this exchange, both parties learn about audio language, the contribution of a room and the relative value of a piece of equipment.