[grw_]

My guess is that it's a similar social phenomenon to flat-earthers, qanon, etc, in that a group of like-minded people form and customs emerge in which making ever-more outlandish claims are taken as stronger commitment signal to the group. I was reading last week about an 'audiophile ssd' product and I browsed an audiofile forum thread[0], expecting to have a chuckle at users ridiculing it but there's actually 6 pages of people praising it and finding new adjectives to describe the sound it produces. The most popular posts [1] also detail other absurd things they have done to produce a better sound- "I can opt to convert a FLAC to WAV format and play that from RAM, this somehow lowers the perceived noise flow and makes music sound more organic and detailed"

[0] https://audiophilestyle.com/forums/topic/62753-nvme-ssd-desi... [1] https://audiophilestyle.com/forums/topic/62753-nvme-ssd-desi...

[gambiting]

Jesus Christ that forum thread. Those people really need mental help. Like, how can a mentally stable person write something like:

"A system deficit I recognized over the last several months was choral music, couldn't enjoy it when played as I was hearing wrong harmonics, kind of a glaze on the sound with poor word intelligibility regardless of whether the OS resided on Optane or in RAM. Had me agonizing over what could fix it...problem solved using the FEMTO NVMe drive"

[habeebtc]

From folks I know in the audio biz, there is an element of status symbol to it.

Or more generally Elitism. If there is much difference between the two, anyways.

[AndrewUnmuted]

I am in audio and routinely sit in 400k+ listening rooms.

Those folks would be embarrassed to mention those rooms contained things as goofy as this. It's excessive and unreasonable.