It’s important to appreciate that there are several different breeds of audiophile out there…
There are those that are obsessed with objectively measurable sound quality. They want to reproduce the recorded waveform as accurately as possible, and they want products that can be measured doing that, but they often pursue accuracy beyond the limits of any human to hear.
There are those that like a little distortion or degradation if it sounds nice to them. These are the people who collect tube amps and will openly admit they’re not as accurate, but accuracy is not what they’re after.
There are those who embrace voodoo. I knew a physics professor who was one of these. He had hideously expensive isolation platforms, resonator weights, unobtanium cables, “ambient field conditioners”… You name it. He knew there was no scientific basis for any them to work, but he had very deliberately deluded himself. If asked, he’d explain that the ultimate goal of the audiophile’s pursuit was pleasure. If he could shut down his reasoning and spend hours moving resonator stones around on top of his CD transport until he thought he had improved the sound, and this gave him pleasure, was that pleasure not real even if the sound was exactly the same?
Then there are those who combine contradictory aspects of all of the above without any self-awareness or critical thinking skills. That’s the sort that will torment themselves, and others, arguing on internet forums about why their own snake oil of choice is legitimate, real, and how anyone who isn’t using it is a cretin.
Source: Improved audio rendering with an optimised version of memcpy (2013) | Hacker News