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An audiophile, most generally, is a lover of sound or music, but the word is more commonly used about someone who cares about hi-fi playback of sound recordings, rather than live performances. In some cases, an audiophile desires an improvement in the sound quality of live performances, which is often remarkably poor.
Audiophiles are constantly searching for ways to improve their hi-fi system. There are discussion forums, magazines and clubs for audiophiles to share their discoveries. While audio purists try to find objective improvements in sound quality, a few focus on the subjective; "what sounds better". This can lead to changes that are not improvements, even though some perceive a difference.
As a result, some audiophiles have claimed improvements from a wide variety of changes, from the ordinary (adjusting speaker placement) to the bizarre (attaching plastic tags to the power cables of non-audio equipment, such as toasters, and similar kinds of snake oil).
In some cases, the opposite is true. A change degrades the fidelity of the signal, while making it sound "better" to the listener. For instance, it has been claimed that certain hyped, "hard to come by" electronic components are more "musical" than others. When tested, they are actually found to be of such low quality that they introduce inductive feedback, resonance, and hence, reverb effects; making the music sound "better", while actually degrading the signal. The low-quality components, which are practically worthless, are then sold at very high profits to so-called "audiofools". There is also a lot of mass market gear that will not have high fidelity. Some of the "high-end" gear measures well, subjectively sounds good, and is not disposeable.
This tendency pervades the entire professional sound engineering and production industry, which to this day heavily uses analogue tape and vacuum tube equipment because it sounds "warmer". Often, such techniques are used to get a better, "warmer", sound on purpose, such as overdriven tube amplifiers for guitar, or saturated tape recordings of drum tracks, during the recording phase of music. This is a different concept than the audiophile ideal of "perfect sound reproduction", and is a "valid" use of these effects.
Audiophile is also used as an adjective in descriptions of audio equipment and recorded music, where it is intended to imply high quality.
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