Audiophile

Yes, I am an audiophile.

According to Merriam-Webster.com, “Audiophiles are an exceptional breed of people who are fascinated by pure audio, motivated by sound quality and addicted to audio gadgets. Audiophiles take their passion for music one step further. They’re curious about how songs are recorded and the science behind how sounds are reproduced.”

What makes me an audiofile? I spent 10 years running sound at church. Depending on the church and their sound budget I have used between 8 channel up to 64 channel soundboards. The soundboard was connected to the speakers up on the stage or platform using an audio snake. For the scope of this article, I won't go into all of the different types of speakers or microphones due to the volume of technical details that would go into that.

I attended a very large nondenominational church in Atlanta Georgia. I was not allowed to volunteer in their sound booth until I attended several sound seminars that the church paid for. I spent an entire weekend learning about sound itself. I learned about the different sound waves and how they interact with different types of material in many different types of locations. Sound produced in a sound studio is much different than say an outdoor concert or on the stage in an inside venue. My education on sound and sound equipment was designed for a lay person to understand sound on a basic level and be able to understand how to run a professional sound board and understand how output and input devices interact with it.