A lot of good points, especially with respect to the pro's valuing durability, reliability (no tubes), and cost effectiveness (no expensive interconnects) - in the end the pro's (particularly studio owners) look at equipment just as tools to make money. Unfortunatley - if the end result is a commercial release for car radios and boomboxes - the only thing that matters is that it sound LOUD (there goes the dynamic range). Another problem for the pro's is that there may be literally miles of cabling in a modern studio including a 96 input console and perhaps thirty or forty outboard effect devices and hundreds of op amps in the signal path. All that stuffs absolutely kills the transparency and detail - it's a wonder the music doesn't sound worse than it already does. Just replacing the power cords with even moderately priced $100 units would be an improvement! Have you ever listened to Yamaha NS 10's, the "industry standard" nearfield monitor? Just horrendous (even with the "hip" modification of scotch-taping a sheet of toilet paper over the tweeter!!!) It's a shame that although the pros have a lot to learn from the audiophiles, they'll never admit it (it's easier to dismiss us as fanatics and pretend that their music sounds great just the way it is). On the other hand, there are a few honest pros -Roger Nichols of Steely Dan fame recently complained in EQ magazine that as a judge for this years engineering Grammy -he didn't hear a single recording that he though worthy of any award at all! Classical recordings and really good jazz recording (e.g. ECM) obviously are exceptions. If you listen to some Mapleshade recordings you can get an idea of what just a few microphones straight to a 2 track master sound like (now if Pierre could just get some better talent to record we could all die happy). Finally, if you look at the playback systems used by the top mastering guys (Ludwig, Purcell, etc) they look exactly like....AUDIOPHILE rigs - complete with multi-thousand dollar interconnects and speaker cables. The bottom line is that every single resistor, capacitor, wire, tube, compnent, whatever in the signal path - whether it's on record or playback - affects the sound. Then it's just a matter of money, effort, and fanatacism. But the choice is yours - you can get off whenever you want.
What about "Pro" vs. Audiophile ?????
In all my years as an "audiophile" I've often wondered why spend all the time/money, researching/buying gear that MUST be far superior to anything in any recording studio? Is this pursuit really worth it or should we all be trying to recreate what the studio engineer was listening to when doing the final mix ?