I like to think of audiophile gear as woo for men.

I wonder sometimes if humans just have an innate need for magical thinking and if we eliminate it from most areas of our life it just finds some other place to pop up. If that hypothesis is true, then audiophile gear is a net positive: it's an almost entirely harmless place to indulge in nonsense magical thinking with no harm to anything but your pocketbook.

I'd rather people spend $1000 on HDMI cables than trying to use homeopathic medicine to cure their cancer or taking away rights from people because it goes against an ancient fiction book they really like.