Headphones

Treating audio equipment, especially signal chain devices such as dacs, amps and even cables as some kind of black box only wizards such as audio engineers can build and understand and buying multi thousand dollar DACs for the sound. It's kinda sad cause there's really no ultimate reconsiliation between this approach and believing in AES style listening research and measurements, I just tend not to engage in the big arguments or post adversarial shit in threads of people discussing tube signatures or whatever. It's only my opinion but I'd love for the hobby to be way more focused on the actual headphones and speakers and masters/releases which make an enormous difference, and if you wanna get nerdy about it I wanna talk about recording/mixing techniques and all that stuff that's actually part of how music is made and reproduced rather than the quality of a boutique discrete DAC with 40000 components only to produce a passably clean signal rivalling the sansa clip+

reddit is a nice half and half or maybe even leans towards buying transparent signal chain gear and using EQ so that's neat, I haven't been on head-fi in a while but from what I remember every IEM thread had people talking about DAP synergy and the inevitable cable posts about copper vs silver vs silver plated copper vs whatever else