4 ms·

Do any of the audiophiles on HN know if it's just fashionable to hate Bose or are there actually double-blind studies done in which music listeners consistently

by eob 12y ago

Do any of the audiophiles on HN know if it's just fashionable to hate Bose or are there actually double-blind studies done in which music listeners consistently rate Bose as worse than price-comparable alternatives? I'm not an audiophile by any means, but I also get the sense that many around me seem to have disdain for Bose. I also stumbled into possession of QC headphones and some Bose speakers for my house and think they're great. So I've always wondered at what the precisely stated and justified beef is.

wtallis 12y ago
There's certainly a lot of hate that only makes sense with audiophile logic, and a lot that stems from Bose not playing the same marketing game that everyone else does. Amar Bose wasn't a charlatan. But like any premium brand that's marketed by marketers rather than engineers, sometimes things end up overpriced and benefits get overstated.
aeberbach 12y ago
I don't call myself an audiophile but I have owned a lot of different headphones up to the $1500 mark. There's no need (and no way) for double-blind studies here. We're not talking magic cables. Objectively you can plot frequency results with actual science and measure a difference. Subjectively you can experience it, and of course there is the look, smell, weight, clamping pressure, earpiece comfort and texture of the things as they sit on your head (hence no blind testing possible). I have disdain for Bose because of their breathless hype, misleading sales practises, high cost and (subjectively speaking) mediocre performance. Lots of people disagree with me and like Bose a lot. And that's just fine.
- MichaelGG 12y ago
  Well if you selected people that weren't overly familiar with the headphones and blindfolded them, they probably wouldn't know the difference offhand. And the testers would not need to see the people listening.
qq66 12y ago
Bose has consistently made the world's best-performing active noise cancellation headsets. In home theater, they've targeted the best performance per unit of "unsightliness", so people who are willing to have 10 cubic foot floorstanding speakers scoff at their performance. But nobody can really touch them in price per unit of speaker volume, which is an important aesthetic parameter for Bose's customer base.
hrktb 12y ago
The beef if Bose headphone don't sound good. This comes out in every possible review, subjective ones [0] where Bose headphones are best at noise cancelling and bad at sound quality; or you can try to compare for yourself the frequency response or distortion [1] against a Sony MDR v6 for instance, which retails at 100$ and represent pretty well average quality headphones I think. [0] http://thewirecutter.com/reviews/best-noise-canceling-headphones/ http://thewirecutter.com/reviews/best-noise-canceling-headph... [1] http://www.headphone.com/pages/build-a-graph http://www.headphone.com/pages/build-a-graph

by eob 12y ago

wtallis 12y ago

There's certainly a lot of hate that only makes sense with audiophile logic, and a lot that stems from Bose not playing the same marketing game that everyone else does. Amar Bose wasn't a charlatan. But like any premium brand that's marketed by marketers rather than engineers, sometimes things end up overpriced and benefits get overstated.

aeberbach 12y ago

I don't call myself an audiophile but I have owned a lot of different headphones up to the $1500 mark. There's no need (and no way) for double-blind studies here. We're not talking magic cables. Objectively you can plot frequency results with actual science and measure a difference. Subjectively you can experience it, and of course there is the look, smell, weight, clamping pressure, earpiece comfort and texture of the things as they sit on your head (hence no blind testing possible). I have disdain for Bose because of their breathless hype, misleading sales practises, high cost and (subjectively speaking) mediocre performance. Lots of people disagree with me and like Bose a lot. And that's just fine.

MichaelGG 12y ago
Well if you selected people that weren't overly familiar with the headphones and blindfolded them, they probably wouldn't know the difference offhand. And the testers would not need to see the people listening.

qq66 12y ago

Bose has consistently made the world's best-performing active noise cancellation headsets. In home theater, they've targeted the best performance per unit of "unsightliness", so people who are willing to have 10 cubic foot floorstanding speakers scoff at their performance. But nobody can really touch them in price per unit of speaker volume, which is an important aesthetic parameter for Bose's customer base.

hrktb 12y ago

The beef if Bose headphone don't sound good. This comes out in every possible review, subjective ones [0] where Bose headphones are best at noise cancelling and bad at sound quality; or you can try to compare for yourself the frequency response or distortion [1] against a Sony MDR v6 for instance, which retails at 100$ and represent pretty well average quality headphones I think. [0] http://thewirecutter.com/reviews/best-noise-canceling-headphones/ http://thewirecutter.com/reviews/best-noise-canceling-headph... [1] http://www.headphone.com/pages/build-a-graph http://www.headphone.com/pages/build-a-graph