Taken from https://www.kenrockwell.com/audio/audiophile.htm (my emphasis in bold):
Audiophiles are what's left after almost all of the knowledgeable music and engineering people left the audio scene back in the 1980s. Audiophiles are non-technical, non-musical kooks who imagine the darnedestly stupid things about audio equipment. Audiophiles are fun to watch; they're just as confused at how audio equipment or music really works as primitive men like cargo cults are about airplanes. An audiophile will waste days comparing the sound of power cords or different kinds of solder, but won't even notice that his speakers are out-of-phase. An audiophile never enjoys music; he only listens to the sound of audio equipment.
Since sound and music perception is entirely imaginary (you can't touch or photograph a musical image), what and how we hear is formed only in our brains and is not measurable. Our hearing therefore is highly susceptible to the powers of suggestion. If an audiophile pays $5,000 for a new power cord, he will hear a very real difference, even though the sound is unchanged. Audiophiles do hear real differences in power cords when they swap among them (the placebo effect), but just don't ask them to hear the difference in a double-blind test.
Just like a pedophile, the word audiophile is defined as someone with an unhealthy attraction or interest in something; in this case, it's audio equipment, but not music. An audiophile and a music lover are two entirely different people.
Audiophiles adore audio equipment, which is completely unrelated to enjoying music. In the good old days, music lovers only played with audio equipment because they had to, while audiophiles today would rather listen to their equipment than to enjoy music.
A music lover will stop what he's doing and stay glued to a favorite piece of music even if it's coming over a 3" speaker or a public-address system, while an audiophile almost never enjoys music, even if played on a $100,000 hi-fi.
Because audiophiles don't have the experience or education to understand what matters (the skill of the original recording engineer, the choice of loudspeakers, their placement in a room and the acoustics of that room), audiophiles spend fortunes on the wrong things, which are the high-profit-margin and well advertised items like cables, power conditioners, amplifiers, power cables, connectors, resistors, and just about everything that has almost nothing to do with the quality of reproduced music — but makes loads of money for the people selling these fetishes.
There's nothing wrong with owning the finest equipment or a $25,000 speaker cable, but all the professional musicians I know have none of this. More important are good recordings of great performances, great speakers, careful placement and good home acoustics. We know domestic sound reproduction is never going be perfect, so we just get close enough, get over it, and enjoy the music, letting our imaginations fill in the difference for us since we're intimately familiar with live performances. We listen to the music, not the gear. The only big-name musicians I've seen pitching audio equipment are those who are paid for their endorsements.
A music lover spends more time at live performances, either as audience or as performer, than pretending to reproduce it at home.
An audiophile will spend a lifetime swapping cables or magic stones and never be able to sit though an entire piece without stopping and tweaking something. To an audiophile, 25 pounds of solid billet aluminum around his equipment and blue lights defines sound quality, while the actual amount of copper on the inside, or to what it's connected or what it's doing, is far less important.
To an audiophile, the hobby is all about playing with equipment, not enjoying music.
A music lover uses the same gear for years or decades. He gets what sounds great, like some electrostatics or whatever, and keeps it nearly forever, thoroughly enjoying all his new recordings of great acts. Audio equipment is always a good investment; it lasts for decades. A music lover spends more on concerts and recordings than he ever does on stereo equipment, and he enjoys his music immensely for hours and hours on end, not even knowing that there's any equipment involved: he's enjoying the music itself, not listening for artifacts that aren't really there.
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Originally Posted by Barry
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