Some semi-cheeky snapshot impressions of some different online portable audio communities I have been a part of.
Head Fi
Head Fi is the motherland. It is the oldest, largest and most diverse online community devoted to portable audio.
At its best: Head-Fi is a diverse community where, no matter what your tastes, beliefs and interests are, there will be others of like mind with whom you can find fellowship. I’ve always loved Head Fi for its lack of a central orthodoxy—everyone here is more-or-less free to pursue this hobby in whatever way is meaningful for them. I’m sure I could find someone into audio rocks if I looked hard enough. It’s a great place to banter about whatever gear is inspiring you at a given moment, and an even better place to meet people, make connections and be exposed to new gear and new ideas.
At its worst: Like so much else in this world given the current economic system we live under this hobby is only possible by virtue of the fact that there are people who want and are able to make money at it. As such there will always be a natural tension between the money interests on the one side integrity of the hobby on the other. Often (and ideally) there can be a balance. When people make products it’s natural that they want to generate some exposure to these products through marketing, samples, hype, reviews etc. This is totally normal. But the people who make these products want and more importantly need them to sell regardless of whether they’re trash or gold. Head Fi, while supportive of the hobby at the end of the day, is fundamentally a business and as such will naturally tend to side towards the business side of things and the site/community. At its worst Head Fi can seem like a sea of (overt and undercover) industry PR people that can be hard to navigate through to discern what is hype and what is helpful information.*
*It's worth pointing out that Head Fi often gets singled out for this mostly because it's the largest site. My experience is that the $$ influence is present to one degree or another all the time everywhere-- even among groups and people who slam "shill reviewers who give everything 10/10" and aim to "keep it real" by being aggressively negative, but who are in fact pushing a different agenda of their own and thus just trading one form of insincere reviewing for another.
SBAF
The place which shall not be named has an origin and history that goes back well before I got into this hobby and which I’m not going to get into now. Its membership consists of a broad swath of the audio community whose seem, at least in part, united by their disdain for the more purely money driven aspect of this hobby.
At its best: At its best it is a great—arguably the best-- place to go to get focused, consistent, high quality information. Unfortunately (for me) it’s not a great place to go to simply banter about gear you love—in fact this is actively discouraged as far as I can tell. Also, there seems to be a lot more interest in 2-channel and full size there and less on IEMs.
At its worst: At its worst it can feel like you were air dropped into a Stonecutters meeting without being invited or, if you go there without really knowing the lay of the land on the wrong day it’s easy to wind up feeling like Booger does at the end of this video:
Discord
Discord in general is like the Mos Eisley Spaceport—the good, the bad, and the ugly can all be found there if you know where to look. In terms of portable audio Discord serves primarily as a portal into the South East Asian (SEA) audio community which, in terms of market share, utterly dwarfs that of the rest of the world.
At its best: At its best Discord is a cosmopolitan world-wide community that is at the same time loose yet tight knit. It is a great source of friendship, conversation and information. I don’t think, in any other hobby I’ve been a part of, has it ever been as easy to get into a discussion with as many people from as many far-flung corners of the globe around a common passion. It gives one a glimmer of the sort world civilization based on a free-flowing exchange of ideas that we could aspire to and that our communications technology (among other things) is rapidly pushing us towards.
At its worst: At its worst the audio community on Discord feels like a small communist country with an established orthodoxy, an emphasis on conformity, and where everyone’s opinion feels like a slightly different version of one guy’s opinion. I think this is ultimately a function of the platform itself more than anything else. All of the Discord servers I've participated in eventually devolve to a sort of Lord of the Flies like dynamic where dominant voices control the narrative and diversity of opinion tends to diminish.
Reddit
r/headphones feels like a number of different communities loosely stitched together. You’ve got your usual 20 something college student neckbeard types that make up the bulk of reddit’s baseline demographic—this perhaps explains why you have to weed through page after page of memes to find any decent content. Add onto that a solid core of measurement fascists, ChiFi horders, randos and a collection of people who seemingly wound up there because they’ve been driven out of every other online audio haunt... there you have it.
At its best: Reddit was the first place I started discussing IEMs online so it will always have a special place in my heart. Many of my closest “audio friends” are people I met there first and I feel it’s still a place where good discussion and connections can be had…it’s just a bit hit or miss in my experience, especially lately.
At its worst: You can drown in a sea of memes, or be called out for suggesting a cable upgrade, or lynched by people who resent anyone able to spend more than $50 on their next upgrade. At its worst it seems like a mix of the following types:
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