Same here. Also, I now have tinnitus and partial hearing loss, so the audio snobbery makes me incredibly envious of those people that could always hear so much

Same here. Also, I now have tinnitus and partial hearing loss, so the audio snobbery makes me incredibly envious of those people that could always hear so much better than I can, such that they just have to complain about hearing the little extra things (or notice the missing bits) that annoy them. It's great that audiophiles can hear so well, but when they start talking about tubes and premium cables and vinyl records and gold-plated contacts, I just want to give them an otitis media infection that cuts them down to my level. You just don't know what you've got 'til it's gone. I know that's wrong to wish such ill upon others, but it's so much harder to suppress my envy when I'm being inundated by what appears from my perspective to be superstitious nonsense. As someone who can still somehow enjoy music when it's encoded as a 64k/s MP3 file, I am baffled as to how someone can say the very same music can be bad at 128k/s. I'm just glad that I can still hear it at all!