HiFi snobs

I really dislike labels as they apply to people. I have spent much of my adult life working hard at removing them from my lexicon. Labels encourage us to place complex people in simplistic organized little boxes. That hardly allows for diversity or nuance. Yet, today's crowd seems ever more eager to assign labels to people in the same way we might catalog sweaters or golf clubs. One consistent label thrown at our community is that of the HiFi snob. A person who believes that their tastes in music and its reproduction in the home are vastly superior to those of other people. What is troubling about that definition narrows down to a single word. Taste. Taste infers superiority. How would you or anyone else feel if another claimed superiority? What we can safely say without issue is that our system's performance vastly outperforms that of the average person's home audio setup. It's why anyone can walk into the room of a highly resolving high-end audio setup and immediately hear that which they are unable to experience in their own home. It's why the label golden-eared audiophile is disingenuous. Our carefully crafted systems are the star performers. We're just along for the ride.