These are not the professionals, professionals and people who like to listen to music are completely different bunch apart from audiophiles.
The audiophiles don't like music and don't make money from their equipment, they simply obsess with it. They are like those camera nerds talking about the sensors, color science and so on but are not actually into photography. The professional photographers simply use the equipment for the task and the people who love photography don't obsess with the camera. Same thing with the audio.
I'm a proud audiophile. For me it was always about the music.
These are not incompatible pursuits. In fact, they pair rather nicely.
As a kid I was amazed by music on the cheap radio we had. And then when I listened on headphones, it was a whole other world full of details I couldn't hear on the cheap radio speaker. And it made me fall in love with music even more.
As an adult I spend a few years learning about the gear and making various purchases, even building my own speakers from kits. Did I like tinkering with the gear? Yeah, that was kind of fun, but it was largely a means to an end, which was the music.
The unfortunate fact is that music lovers who don't think about the gear are getting a crappy version of the music. If you know what you're doing, you can get some pretty world-class sound for well under a grand or even a few hundred bucks. If not, you get a Bluetooth speaker for the same amount of money that sounds like garbage and sucks the life out of your music.
You can still enjoy music that way! Many do! I sure can! But it's like wandering through the Louvre with filthy, smudged glasses. If you really like the art, it's worthwhile to clean those things off so you can really see what you're looking at.
I'm sorry but you seem to have some sort of vendetta against a group you are branding as audiophiles, which shares very little in common with the vast majority of audiophiles.
There definitely an element of being a gearhead, but I just really love music, and want to listen to it in the most accurate way possible.
> The audiophiles don't like music
That is a pretty bold claim to make with such confidence about a massive and diverse group of people whose name literally means lover of audio.
I bet I spend 20 or so hours a year researching headphones. My current daily drivers are $11 earbuds and a pair of $80 cans for focused listening. As with most things, there are a vocal few who do obsesses and come across as elitist, but I have a hunch that people like me are the (largely) silent majority.
I'll spend a little on earbuds (AirPods, actually), but I feel you on the headphones. I do a lot of audio and video work, and after extensive research over the last ~decade I've just got literally half a dozen pairs of Sony MDR-V6's around; they're $100, they sound pleasant and also reasonably representative (though not as representative as my monitors, which is to be expected!), and unlike the Beyerdynamic DT-990s they actually fit on my head (I am a problem for hat-makers).
Well, I would consider myself to be an audiophile. I got professional level equipment for about $400 many many years ago. Today it is probably even cheaper. I spend a lot of time on PSU, interference from power grid etc... Solved by $20 car battery...
For an "audiophile" AirPods are ripoff similar to CD demagnetizer.
The audiophiles don't like music and don't make money from their equipment, they simply obsess with it. They are like those camera nerds talking about the sensors, color science and so on but are not actually into photography. The professional photographers simply use the equipment for the task and the people who love photography don't obsess with the camera. Same thing with the audio.