An audiophile is someone who really loves music, but also cares deeply about the way the music sounds. Like anyone, you’re someone who grew up listening to your favourite artist’s music and loving it. Now imagine listening to your favourite song playing, but on crappy speakers at the railway station - does that make you cringe? This means that you care about the way your music sounds - you are an audiophile. Simply put, for an audiophile,  it’s not enough to listen to music that you love - it has to sound good for it to move you.

Audiophile headphones don’t need to be expensive. For under Rs. 1500 you can get very good sounding In-Ear Headphones. Pair it along with an inexpensive DAC - some are as cheap as Rs. 2000, and you have a pretty incredible sounding setup for an audiophile. There are some even cheaper options available, but this is a good starting point.

Youtube, Gaana or JioSaavn are all pretty nice streaming platforms. But they all play music,  at a fraction of the resolution as a music CD. MP3 files are similarly heavily compressed file format. 

Imagine your favorite artist composing and recording your favorite song in a studio with sound equipment worth millions, so that you can hear every layer, every detail to appreciate the music. What’s the point of it, if you’ve taken the track - compressed it down to the minimum to stream it - only to listen to it on crappy sounding headphones?

On a good pair of headphones, with a good DAC, you can hear a lot more details. The only caveat is, you gotta listen to a well recorded soundtrack to judge. Some songs are sometimes quite badly recorded, where there isn't much there to listen to anyway. But the chances are, no one's listening to them these days anyway.

When you buy a wireless headphone, you're paying for a pair of speakers, tons of batteries, a bluetooth chip set, an inbuilt amplifier and DAC, and several sensors and electronics. The chances are the speaker themselves are just a fraction of the value you paid. They’re convenient, and are great to use for calls, movies, videos and games. 

But if you're planning on listening to music, using a wired headphone should sound a lot better. Wired headphones are just a pair of speakers and cable inside a housing. The chances are that for the same amount of money, wired headphones will sound much, much better.

You’d need to use a dongle DAC and plug them into your phone via USB-C for Android, or Lightning connector for iOS. And the stock dongle adaptors are going to sound pretty ordinary, and getting a hi-res DAC is going to sound much better.