> Self-styled audiophiles are, by and large, idiots with way too much money plagued by magical thinking.
Not just that. But the arrogance and fanboyism is rampant.
God forbid you ever consider buying a Bose or Beats product.
Not just that. But the arrogance and fanboyism is rampant.
God forbid you ever consider buying a Bose or Beats product.
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.
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.
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.
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?
http://www.innerfidelity.com/content/headphone-measurement-p...
http://www.headphone.com/pages/evaluating-headphones
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"
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?
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.
Or Superlux HD668B which can be found for $30 last time I checked.
Or if you want IEMs, you're not going to beat Hifiman RE-400 for any IEM under $300.
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 :-)
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.
http://en-us.sennheiser.com/dynamic-headphones-high-end-arou...
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.
> 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.
There are three brands of headphones that pros use: Beyerdynamic (typically DT-100 or DT-770), Sennheiser (typically HD-5/650) and Sony (typically MDR-7506/9). Beyerdynamics have somewhat better isolation so they're more popular in music studios, Sonys are more comfortable when you have to wear them all day so they're more popular on film sets; I favor the 7506 and am on my 4th or 5th pair. Some people love Sennheisers but I personally don't care for the ergonomics.
They're not beautiful, lightweight, or fashionable, but they're a lot nicer to listen to - which is why one or other of them was almost certainly used at the recording stage. If it was good enough for the people who made the recording, it's good enough for you. Also, you'll save money compared to the 'quality' consumer brands.
The MDR-7509 and its successors the 7910 and 7920 have a lower impedance than the 7506 (24 vs 63 ohms) so if you plug them into the same sound source the higher-numbered models will be a bit louder - and as we all know, 'louder = better' for most people. This plus the larger driver is somewhat helpful for DJs, who work in very loud environments, but that's a fast track to hearing damage.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_MDR-V6
Why I like the 7506 so much: on film sets I give them to eople to listen in and they say 'is it on? I don't hear anything.' Then I turn the volume down or make a small noise next to the boom microphone and jaws drop. Plugged into a quality microphone like a Schoeps, which has a very flat frequency response, it's like there's nothing there. I always have two pairs now because if one gets damaged I can't deal with other brands at all.
And for heavy noise cancelling goals it was very good (like, being able to work with someone with a lawnmower or a drill next to you)
Granted, half of the noise isolation is passive, half active, still, very good
The sound is very clear, but not balanced. Neither an expert nor a musician though.
Your comments over those years don't seem bad at all - sometimes perhaps a little confrontational but not aggressively so. Perhaps HN could allow users above a certain karma threshold vote on [dead] posts, with those scores going towards a "repeal fund" - make decent comments over a certain period and get temporarily un-banned.
Sennheiser HD280 Pros have extremely good passive isolation, and will beat QC15s at a fraction of the price, in both isolation and audio quality.
So yes, Bose still loses when you look at the big picture. Bose is very good at marketing, they are not very good at making quality audio.
Erik Larson is pretty vocal about his use of LCD-2s for mastering. Which... Honestly, I'm not generally a fan of his work, so it's not necessarily a ringing endorsement.
Also kind of surprised at your lack of mention of AKGs - they're another very popular brand for studio work.
I can't stand the Sonys. They're specifically designed for tracking & editing - all that screech points up Bad Things Happening. But they fatigue my ears.
Laugh now, but I landed on the Koss KTXPRO1 ( which are $20 to $40 ) and have basically stopped looking :) Most comfortable thing I've ever used and they're actually pretty flat, except for a little bass bump and a smidgen of upper mid. I think I'm on my tenth pair. They're a bit too light weight - if you catch the cable on something they'll fly off your head.
And yeah - I bet the $500 vs $20 figures into my perception of things.
I can mix on 'em, at least to the rough stage.
But, your statements about "pro" headphones are accurate. They aren't the nicest looking, but they are really good, and I always recommend a good pro set of headphones over the marketed crap from Beats, Bose, Monster, etc. $250 will buy a lot of headphone quality from one of the pro audio manufacturers.
This has little to do with the article. If you've got 100 bucks to spend on a pair of headphones, it's only fair to point out that with certain products you're not getting the best sound out of your money.
Meh, they're okay, but there are better choices out there.
I've a pair of Sennheiser HD600 and it's one of those things that make you go "holy cow, all the hype is justified".
And no, I'm not one of those folks who think gold-plated cables make a difference. Right now I'm listening to MP3 Internet radio on a pair of cheap behind the neck street cans.
I nearly went off on a tangent and bought an amp etc, but I'm happy with my much cheaper HD380's - great price/performance :) But those 600's are awesome.
[1] I've since learned it's called soundstage
[2] How would the source influence soundstage? Sounds irrational to me. Hey, one sounded better than the other and I don't know why.
Work bought me a pair of 380 HD Pros, and I'm impressed on how much of an upgrade they are over the 280s - I can only imagine how good the other Sennheisers are.
The 280s are closed back. Great for isolation, for not letting ambient sound interfere with the music. It also changes the way the transducers work, a little bit.
The 600s are open back. Obviously there's no isolation, but the transducers work more freely. It's a bit easier to distinguish tiny sounds from a huge background.
I've both the 600 and the 280. Great phones both, in different ways.