Bose and beats* are by, every /objective/ measure, shitty products.
Subjectively, you might like them, but the faithfulness of audio reproduction is not a subjective matter. You can play a tone and measure how well that tone is actually played back.
You can then also objectively compare things that produce that playback quality at various price points and figure out if they're priced competitively.
There is plenty of fanboyism in high end audio, but that's not why they say Bose and Beats are shitty. It's because Bose and Beats ARE shitty.
*The Solo 2 Beats actually measure very well. They're even competitively priced... with other overpriced fashion statement headphones. They're still overpriced vs. headphones that are just meant to play music well.
Are Beats shitty or just expensive? How little would I have to pay to get same quality?
I am finding it hard to believe that they are actually shitty, while I find it very easy to believe that they are way overpriced.
I have never listened to Beats headphones but I imagine they have a lot of base-boost (based on absolutely nothing), but that is not the same as shitty.
So, we have to define, in your opinion, what would make a pair of headphones shitty.
If you are going to reduce them to the basest level of what the purpose for a speaker or headphone is, to reproduce the input sound, then yes, they are shitty, because they are not good at that.
From a purely objective standpoint, you are going to have to judge them based on that. Why would you want the speakers or headphones to make a different sound than what the signal is?
If you want to move away from an objective measurement of what makes a headphone good or not to something that's purely subjective (i.e. 'I like how they sound'), it's impossible to answer that question.
The Solo2 are a pair of Beats headphones that actually measure really well - they're good at the base purpose of a transducer. But they're $250. You could buy a pair of Sony MDR-7506 that measure similarly (IIRC, a bit better, even) for $85.
>If you are going to reduce them to the basest level of what the purpose for a speaker or headphone is, to reproduce the input sound, then yes, they are shitty, because they are not good at that.
Though I don't personally like the cold, base heavy sound of Beats, I don't really get how you could know this, because most people have no idea what a piece of music should sound like. They know how they think it should sound, they know how they like it to sound, but very few know how it should sound. The only real exception to this is music with "real" instruments like pianos who's sound is familiar to enough people that their reproduction can be reliably determined. Even then, however, unless you know the piece well, it's unlikely most of us are in a good position to make a judgement about the speaker's quality.
So what factors are you using to determine if the sound is reproduces correctly?
This is a pretty scientific matter - when I say "the purpose is to reproduce the input sound", we can tell exactly what is supposed to be reproduced, and we can tell exactly how capable the speaker is of reproducing it.
Some exceptions have to be made due to how having headphones on your head causes the sound to change, but again, these are pretty much known quantities - to get the equivalent of a flat response from a speaker, you will see change X in bass response, change Y in treble response, etc for headphones.
It's not a question of esoteric "The artist and recording engineer meant for this to be played on Kef blades powered by a Cary tube pre-amp feeding into a Mcintosh amp setup using a rail to rail ladder DAC", but a "We know how frequency response should look when measuring equipment and if it doesn't look like that then the sound you are getting out of it is different than the source material"
> This is a pretty scientific matter - when I say "the purpose is to reproduce the input sound", we can tell exactly what is supposed to be reproduced, and we can tell exactly how capable the speaker is of reproducing it.
You are assuming the song was mixed by someone wearing headphones that perfectly reproduce the input sound.
Suppose the person who mixed a song was using beats headphones or other headphones that audiophiles consider inferior but that they know the majority of people use to listen to music. Wouldn't that then mean Beats headphones actually provide the listener with the actual, intended experience?
So, headphone use in studios is not generally for creating the final mix. Monitor speakers are used nearly exclusively in professional studios as what you are mixing for. Headphones have multiple places in the production process where they are used, but they're not the final target.
There's a few reasons for this. The most pragmatic is that doing so will produce the track that sounds the best on the widest variety of setups - EQed or not. There's also not any single headphone out there that is used so predominately that it would make sense to cater to it in specific. The closest might be apple earbuds, but people using those probably aren't too concerned about sound quality anyway, so it doesn't make sense to mix with those in mind either.
From a theoretical standpoint, you're not necessarily wrong, but it's just not how things currently work, and there's not really any reason why it ever would work that way in a professional studio.
I make no claim as to what the people making music exclusively in their bedroom are doing, though.
Interesting. I guess the main concept I'm exploring is the idea that if you don't control for the sound quality that the person mixing it (or more importantly, the person approving the mix) then it's hard to make any claims about how the sound was "meant to be heard".
Given whenever I stand near someone on a train with them I can hear a fair amount of their music (not anywhere near as bad as Apple earbuds though), I assume they can't be that great - that or the listener has very bad hearing.
I have a set of Sennheiser HD 202 which don't have anywhere near the same leakage and cost £35. I haven't tried Beats so can't say much about audio quality, but in my experience high leakage usually means that the audio is poor too. It also means you will listen to music louder to compensate, which leads to more distortion.
> I am finding it hard to believe that they are actually shitty
In that case the marketing team have done a good job :-)
>Given whenever I stand near someone on a train with them I can hear a fair amount of their music (not anywhere near as bad as Apple earbuds though), I assume they can't be that great - that or the listener has very bad hearing.
This makes the mistaken assumption that isolation and good sound are related, which -- as open headphones and speakers can attest -- is not true. The goal of a speaker or headphone is to reproduce music faithfully. Unless you are familiar with the music's origin or it has real instruments who's sounds you can easily identify, it's impossible for most people to tell if the music is reproduced "faithfully". So there are a couple of general rules that most "audiophiles" will consider when dealing with volume:
1. Music played at louder volumes generally sounds better than that at lower volumes. You can hear more of what you are intended to hear.
2. Music often goes up and down in volume, so you want to hear the broadest range of volume.
3. The best listening devices both allow high volumes without clipping and low volumes with clarity.
The point is, just because you can hear it, doesn't mean they are bad headphones.
It also doesn't mean they are good headphones or that the people aren't inconsiderate. It simply means that "sound leakage" isn't really a decent criteria unless it's something that important to you.
Leakage is sometimes intended so it's not necessarily an indicator of quality. See the HD800's. You'll hear them in any open-plan office, for sure. There's no attempt to keep the music from leaking, their only priority is sound quality (which is, at this price, a matter of taste and preference).
Yeah, Dr. Dre is on record saying that he's not an audio engineer but he knows what makes hip-hop music sound good. So he never claimed they had "flat response" or anything.
In response to your and your parent’s blanket claims
> Bose and beats* are by, every /objective/ measure, shitty products.
> God forbid you ever consider buying a Bose or Beats product.
If you need faithful audio reproduction, start with the room. There are reasons for buying a portable Bluetooth-enabled speaker, and also reasons one may consider specifically Bose SoundLink. Sound quality, in this sense, is not among them.
As far I've tried NC headphones, nothing comes even close to what Bose offer with QC25, any other brand I've tried cancel out less noise than the bose. Sound quality might not be the best, but the intented environment is the limiting factor anyway, and they do a great job at dealing with environment noise.
The biggest problem "audiophiles" don't seem to get is that accurate reproduction is not the end goal of music. Enjoyment is. Audiophiles have convinced themselves to find enjoyment from accurate reproduction, and that's OK. But the majority of the world does not see it that way.
I've got excellent bookshelf speakers that were cheaper than the equivalent from Bose, but the reviews and tests showed them to be way better.
My (small!) speakers end up producing way too much bass for the room they're in, in fact, and I use Foobar 2000 with the "MathAudio Room EQ" plug-in to get a flatter speaker response from them. But their problem isn't that they can't produce bass notes.
Whoosh ... I think my comment went over some people's heads. A "one note bass" isn't a good thing, technically. I did not say that Bose is great at making speakers with excellent bass.
Subjectively, you might like them, but the faithfulness of audio reproduction is not a subjective matter. You can play a tone and measure how well that tone is actually played back.
You can then also objectively compare things that produce that playback quality at various price points and figure out if they're priced competitively.
There is plenty of fanboyism in high end audio, but that's not why they say Bose and Beats are shitty. It's because Bose and Beats ARE shitty.
*The Solo 2 Beats actually measure very well. They're even competitively priced... with other overpriced fashion statement headphones. They're still overpriced vs. headphones that are just meant to play music well.