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Comment by ripitrust | Hacker News Reader

people are buying what they want and obviously those guys buying Beats are not looking for very high quality sound. They are buying for style and recognition. The same stuff that Apple has played on us all these years.

Although this article is indeed a high quality analysis, and the author really done a great job. There is no point arguing that a Beats is not a genuine headphone. Whatever product it is, there are always people who are looking for quality and people who are looking for style (In some market they are one).

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>> They are buying for style and recognition. The same stuff that Apple has played on us all these years.

I'm not a big fan of Apple these days, but Apple products generally do have better than average build quality -as well as- good design and looks.

They are indeed premium priced, but that's a marketing choice. You might be able to nitpick Apple products' value by specs, but I don't think you can really put them in the same bin as Beats (even though Apple now owns Beats) with respect to quality.

I remember comparing the iPod to a minidisc with the same headphones and the same audio compression rate. The iPod was really poor in comparison.

Sony had a minidisk player out in 92' the first iPod came out in 01'. I never personally compared the 2 apples to apples[0] but from memory and having owned both, the ipod held more songs, had a better ui, was easier to use and you could store music with no additional cost(i.e. no need to buy disks).

> The iPod was really poor in comparison.

Do you mean the audio quality? What specifically was worse about it?

[0]pun intended.

Minidisc always sounded better than mp3 to me, but I never tried out the other codecs that Apple use. I wish I could find a replacement battery for my MZ-NH1, it supports PCM recording and I like the idea of optical media better than a flash chip.

As a fan of both Minidisc and iPod this sounds dubious to me. Mp3 allowed you to use both better encoders and higher and a wider range of bitrates than ATRAC. I would have rated the headphones as the weakest part of the chain on the early iPods and you didn't use those.

I really liked my Sharp with ATRAC 2.5. I guess I still like it, but I honestly haven't used my MiniDisc player in probably a decade. MP3 at 320 kbps could encode higher fidelity, but when MiniDisc was popular (sic.) most MP3s were recorded at 128 kbps or even 64 kbps with Joint Stereo. Even Apple's AAC was encoded at lower quality bitrates for years. It wasn't until OGG and lossless WMA seemed like they might put a little pressure on Apple's business model that they increased their bitrates and made it possible to remove the DRM. Of course the upshot of all this movement was that MiniDisc was no longer viable for prerecorded content. It still was an adequate poor man's DAT for my live recording purposes.

There is actually quality and good engineering in Apple products. Beats headphones do not have anything technically new.

What objective criteria do you propose to evaluate build quality?

> They are indeed premium priced, but that's a marketing choice.

Isn't this exactly the problem? Apple has good build quality but a terrible quality/price ratio. In a situation where money is no object and pure quality is the only measure then Apple might very well win out depending on how the customer weighs the value of build quality vs. performance.

But Apple would not be the most profitable company in the world if they were only catering to those types of customers. For the average person a minimum of quality and value are the most important metrics, which Apple would not be winning if it weren't for their marketing and brand, especially in the laptop market.

> They are buying for style and recognition.

That's too simplistic. There's actually quite a few people who prefer Beats' audio, none of that really has much to do with audio tech, but rather with equalizers.

i.e. it's not just style or fashion, it's also sound that really matters. There are quite a few 'blind test' videos on youtube where people prefer the Beats headphones to the technically superior ones.

That doesn't mean that when people prefer Beats' audio, that the audio is 'better', it's just 'better to them'. An objective standard of good audio one could argue is audio that sounds 'as it is', which is where Beats fails. Beats doesn't do that, it deforms the audio to make the bass heavier. And so lots of popular music with young people who like bass, sounds better with Beats, than a more natural headphone which recreates sounds much better.

In short, yes Beats is also about audio, and it's not 'better or worse', just like there's taste in food, fashion, style etc, there's also a taste in audio.

That doesn't fully explain Beats' popularity, of course. There are cheap headphones with equalisers that are bass-heavy that aren't as popular, and that can all be explained like you did with differences in style, fashion, recognition etc. But only mentioning this fails to recognise that there are groups of people who genuinely prefer deformed sound and prefer Beats' audio over even more expensive, technically far superior headphones' audio, regardless of style/fashion etc.

>> That doesn't mean that when people prefer Beats' audio, that the audio is 'better', it's just 'better to them'.

This. It's just like TV sales. A lot of people like those amped up color and contrast settings in big box stores that would make TV-philes gag.

So what?

Tastes are subjective, and judging people by their tastes is more often than not, wasted cognitive effort.

> so lots of popular music

This is the problem. I saw someone ask the other day, "What kind of speakers do professional audio engineers use to make master recordings?" And the answer was to buy the lousiest chinese made boombox from Walmart. Pop music mastering is done so it sounds good everywhere, including on the cheapest radios. That's how the loudness wars got started, because the most effective way to make something sound decent on poor speakers is to maximize the loudness.

Rather than pop music either have the people compare something with more range. If they don't like classical music, have them listening to a movie and see if they can clearly hear whispered dialog while not having their ears blown out by an explosion.

Back in the 80s/90s a good percentage of studios had a beatbox above the mixing desk to complement the giant monitors. You wouldn't mix on the beatbox, but you'd check a mix sounded good on it and give some attention if it didn't.

A lot of mixes were made to sound good on cheap bookshelf speakers called NS10s, made by Yamaha. Most studios had them. They weren't hifi, but the story was that if something sounded good on them it would sound good everywhere. I was never completely convinced, and a lot of bright and grainy mixes from then have been remastered since then with less edge. But it was a good story, and it helped sell a lot of speakers.

Now mix engineers are more likely to listen in the car or on cheap headphones, because that's how most people listen to music today.

Mastering studios are more likely to have very clean high-end equipment. Mastering needs subtle changes in tone and dynamics, and you need a clean reference to hear them clearly.

I, myself, couldn't care even a tiny bit about the style of Beats. I buy them because I like how they sound - I like heavy bass, and I found Sennheiser headphones in the same price range to be sounding completely flat and boring for my tastes. Tried even super expensive Sony X-Bass headphones but couldn't find anything that would be comfortable. Have both urBeats and Beats Studio headphones and swear by them - I can use both for hours, my ears don't hurt even though I wear glasses(huge problem with most on-ear headphones for me!) and the music is exactly how I like it. The name on the outside could say diddle-doo for all I care.

The problem is, that people assume everyone wants the best possible sound reproduction. Not true. For the same reason why some people actively like and even prefer greasy dominos pizza instead of the "authentic" stuff. That doesn't mean they are wrong - they just follow their tastes. I found the music played by Beats to be exactly to my tastes - if I find something else which hits that spot but for less money - I will buy that next time instead. But I haven't yet.

I think many people (particularly those who have not done any research, moms, grandparents, etc.) associate the Beats brand recognition with perceived quality. "Oh I see those commercials all the time, and I see people wearing them, they must be good!" sort of thing.

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