141–150 of 165 posts
I cannot figure out any way to reconcile the incredibly poor quality of Beats products with a hopeful future for Apple. Can someone make the argument for why this is a good idea?
$3.2B? I don't get this at all. What exactly does Apple get out of the deal? (1) Their brand is much stronger than Beats. (2) They could design and build high quality headphones if they wanted, the design is quite simple. And (3) if they wanted a music subscription service, they could easily create one of their own.
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This is simply untrue. The best headphones, speakers, and amplifiers, are designed to faithfully reproduce the recorded signal. Anything that does something other than that is a poorly designed product, or a product that is intentionally misleading the consumer. Most cheap products accidentally fail at this goal. Beats products are intentionally designed to be cheap to manufacture, while being bass-heavy and overly b…
Lets be honest here if you want to listen as the engineer and artist intended[1] then you probably want Yamaha NS10s sat on a mixing desk bridge. See this sound on sound article for more (and why you might want a mixing desk) http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/sep08/articles/yamahans10.ht... They are not great speakers but they are probably the target of most pop / rock music in the studio.
It is true that for a decade or two, the NS10 was the monitor on which more records were produced than any other. And, they are reasonably accurate. There are more accurate speakers than the NS10, even at similar prices, but part of the value of the NS10 was that you'd have them wherever you were working. The mastering engineer would have a pair of them, too, so you'd know everybody in the path from tracking to cutting the master would be hearing roughly the same thing. But, it's worth mentioning that I've never been in a professional studio that only had a pair of NS10s. They were considered the sanity check speakers...not the speakers used for all of your mixing and such.
Anyway, the newer models (HS series or MSP series) from Yamaha might be a good choice, if you want good reference monitors.
But, a reasonable level accuracy should be the goal of every transducer. Just because consumers make often make poorly informed decisions based on marketing and tricks played on the ear (because a "hyped" sound, like the Beats headphones and devices, will sound louder and thus "better"...but will also be more fatiguing and will have other negative effects on your listening experience) doesn't mean people who know better should just shut up and let manufacturers do so without criticism.
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This is simply untrue. The best headphones, speakers, and amplifiers, are designed to faithfully reproduce the recorded signal. Anything that does something other than that is a poorly designed product, or a product that is intentionally misleading the consumer. Most cheap products accidentally fail at this goal. Beats products are intentionally designed to be cheap to manufacture, while being bass-heavy and overly b…
This is simply untrue. The best headphones, speakers, and amplifiers, are designed to faithfully reproduce the recorded signal. Have you seen the actual frequency response curves of headphones? They are by no means flat! They can approach flat from 20-20k, but there are always trade offs, at least until you get to certain price points. What is good or bad sound is largely subjective and socially conditioned. The expe…
Yes. And, as I said: Most cheap products accidentally fail at this goal.
It costs a bit of money to produce a quality transducer that is stable, reliably mass-produced, and lasts a long time. Not as much for headphones as for larger transducers, however. For $100 you can buy any of several models that are extremely accurate (compared to what $100 would buy you in speakers). Sennheiser, Shure, AKG, and Audio Technica all offer several models in the $50-$100 range that will destroy Beats offerings at even much higher price points.
Nonetheless, just because most people's cheap headphones suck doesn't mean that a company producing expensive headphones that suck should be given a pass. In a world with good products in a field I care about, why wouldn't I encourage people to choose them over a clearly inferior product? Beats is a demonstrably inferior product with good marketing.
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This is simply untrue. The best headphones, speakers, and amplifiers, are designed to faithfully reproduce the recorded signal. Anything that does something other than that is a poorly designed product, or a product that is intentionally misleading the consumer. Most cheap products accidentally fail at this goal. Beats products are intentionally designed to be cheap to manufacture, while being bass-heavy and overly b…
Lets be honest here if you want to listen as the engineer and artist intended[1] then you probably want Yamaha NS10s sat on a mixing desk bridge. See this sound on sound article for more (and why you might want a mixing desk) http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/sep08/articles/yamahans10.ht... They are not great speakers but they are probably the target of most pop / rock music in the studio.
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> Some people, perhaps most people, want a strong bass. Are they wrong? I think that if people want a strong bass, they should listen to music that has strong bass and use headphones that will accurately reproduce it. If they want music that doesn't have strong bass to sound like it does, well that's the role of the equalizer, not the headphones. The role of the headphones is to take whatever signal they're given and…
What people aren't getting in this thread is that modern pop and hip hop is engineered to be played on systems with a lot of bass (sub woofers). Ironically this forces the engineer to limit the amount of bass in the mix, so there some truth to the claim that a headphone with exaggerated bass will produce a sound closer to the intention of the artist. I think they sound horrendous (I'm an audio engineer) but I have a…
Not true. Engineers working in pop and hip hop mix primarily with the understanding that the first listen by a consumer will be on the radio in their car. This has several built-in assumptions, and the expectation of lots of sub bass being reproduce-able is not among them. Sales of records are heavily affected by how good the song sounds on the radio, and most people have the audio equipment that came with their car.
Not only that, the next stage of music marketing evolution is earbuds. So, if one were to mix for the next most popular method of getting your music into the ears of consumers, you'd mix with the expectation of being heard first through cheap earbuds.
Engineers mix knowing that their tracks will be played on a wide variety of equipment, from very bad to very good. The more accurate their equipment is, the better they'll be able to serve all of those listeners. But, the best results will always come from having accurate equipment for playing it back.
I'm also an audio engineer, and I, too, find the $300 beats headphones to be an abomination to both good sense and good taste. But, I disagree with your suggestion that engineers are mixing with less bass because subwoofers exist.
http://lefsetz.com/wordpress/index.php/archives/2014/04/01/a...
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Some are speculating that Apple is more interested in the beats music streaming service. I'm not sure I buy that -- doesn't Apple nearly have its own? Even if they don't, surely they've got the foundation set to build one quite effortlessly.
Beats is EXTREMELY WELL positioned to be a major iTunes competitor without the overhead of computer hardware and software divisions. Not only that, but while Apple is cool, Dre is much, much cooler.
[1]:http://recode.net/2014/05/08/why-apple-is-betting-big-on-bea...
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They are over marketed a bit and over priced, sure, but just as much as Bose, B&O and a lot of other premium sound brands. How do they objectively have "incredibly poor quality"? Do you have a link that support they have really poor sound quality or bad build quality or horrible customer satisfaction rate?
“In terms of sound performance, they are among the worst you can buy,” says Tyll Hertsens, editor in chief of InnerFidelity.com, a site for audiophiles. “They are absolutely, extraordinarily bad.” http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/20/business/beats-headphones-...
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Beats is EXTREMELY WELL positioned to be a major iTunes competitor without the overhead of computer hardware and software divisions. Not only that, but while Apple is cool, Dre is much, much cooler.
Beats streaming apparently has about 200,000 subscribers. That doesn't seem so cool when it's competitor Spotify has about 10 million subscribers.[1] Even if you think Apple is going for the subscriber base it still doesn't make sense. [1]: http://recode.net/2014/05/08/why-apple-is-betting-big-on-bea...