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How Beats Tricks You into Thinking It Makes a Premium Product
- skaevola 11y agoThe referenced Bolt blog post is a bit more substantial: https://medium.com/@BoltVC/how-it-s-made-series-beats-by-dre-154aae384b36 https://medium.com/@BoltVC/how-it-s-made-series-beats-by-dre...
- free2rhyme214 11y agoThanks for the link. Both are good.
- donatj 11y agoA $23 pair of Sennheisers http://amzn.com/B003LPTAYI http://amzn.com/B003LPTAYI has better sound than any pair of Beats. My snotty nephew wanted a pair of beats for Christmas, I recommended they get him these instead. He wanted Beats, they got him the beats - he promptly broke them. Money well spent. They're more of a fashion statement than anything I guess.
- threeseed 11y agoYou can buy a $2 plain tshirt that will last longer than a $450 Givenchy one. People care about how they look. It isn't some new concept.
- donatj 11y agoI can buy an amazing $200 pair of headphones though. The $450 T-shirt works no better than the $2 one.
- arfar 11y agoDepends on your definition of "works". If "works" means "looks fashionable" and "impresses your peers", then the $450 shirt is works a hell of a lot better.
- fastball 11y agoI think my audio technicas look just as cool as beats, if not better.
- gamerdonkey 11y agoDepends heavily on your peers.
- donatj 11y agoWent and looked at these t-shirts, you can get just as visually appealing ones for $20. The only impression your trying to make with such a shirt is "I have so much money I don't know things value"
- pbreit 11y agoSo do tell us, what $200 headphones are so much better than beats?
- jrs99 11y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZWXPrfjkWg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZWXPrfjkWg
- IE6 11y agoBecause your nephew didn't wan't headphones he wanted beats... if that makes any sense...
- pbreit 11y agoSennheiser HD 202 IIs are lousy compared to pretty much every Beats.
- donatj 11y agoActually they're largely more accurate. My personal favorite headphones, the AKG K240s even more so. Hell, you can get almost any set of Sony MDRs for a fraction of the price and they're insanely accurate. Not hugely comfortable, but accurate. http://graphs.headphone.com/graphCompare.php?graphType=0&graphID[]=483&graphID[]=2581&graphID[]=3191&graphID[]=2611&scale=30 http://graphs.headphone.com/graphCompare.php?graphType=0&gra...
- pbreit 11y agoThat's another thing that many Beats-critics miss: there are features in addition to accuracy that headphone buyers evaluate. Mic, detachable cable, looks, comfort, portability, etc. For many/most people, marginally better accuracy isn't near the top.
- sneak 11y agoTL;DR: they put little metal weights inside of them
- donatj 11y agoI had a cheap chinese camera as a kid. Dropped it and it broke open. There were lead weights inside it. Similar technique.
- benjohnson 11y agoIn the old modem/shareware days we used to stuff random noise files into the .ARC files to make it look like our games were full of awesome things. If a game was 60K, it must be good!
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- subliminalpanda 11y agoBought into the hype early on, bought a pair of the in-ear headphones. A month in the left earpiece stopped working. Tried the solos, sounded like utter crap, no way can they justify the price. I'm no audiophile, but they also sound like utter crap.
- JohnTHaller 11y agoSUMMARY: The $200 Beats Solo contain about $16.89 in parts including cheap ($1.80) off the shelf speaker drivers found in $19 headphones on Amazon. They use metal weights for about 1/3 of the weight to make them feel "premium" and cut every corner in construction to save money (glue instead of screws, etc). Full teardown: https://medium.com/@BoltVC/how-it-s-made-series-beats-by-dre-154aae384b36 https://medium.com/@BoltVC/how-it-s-made-series-beats-by-dre... There are a lot of much better options than Beats out there in terms of both style and/or sound quality.
- ppradhan 11y agocan you suggest what are the brands that spend more on quality and less on marketing? i think those brands should be supported so their already minimal reliance on marketing is further reduced.
- pfg 11y agoI personally like Beyerdynamic headphones. They're quite common in studio settings. Sennheiser has some great stuff as well.
- copperx 11y agoGrado.
- SystemOut 11y agoI'd second Grado if you like open-air style cans. They have a fun retro look and on top of that the pads are easily replaceable. Also, Audio-Technica make really good headphones for the money.
- aethr 11y agoAKG studio range (consumer range is just ok) and audiotechnica both have very high quality options at several price points. Best way to tell AKG studio range is (generally) the cable is detatchable. If the cable is not removable, it's probably the consumer range.
- m_mueller 11y ago
- beedogs 11y agoBeats is a brand for suckers. The great thing about them, though, is their brightly-coloured products stand out so well, it's easy to spot all the stooges in the room.
- angrybits 11y agoI've used Bose earbuds for half a decade or more, and you can pry them from my cold dead hands.
- free2rhyme214 11y agoI own Audio-Technica ATH-M50's. Way better.
- RandallBrown 11y agoI don't have beats, and I haven't tried any out in awhile, but I liked their bass heavy sound when I used them for a few seconds. I also think they're good looking headphones. Some people are willing to pay for that. Doesn't seem like it's a big deal.
- chrischen 11y agoYou're not so much paying for a good look as you are for their marketing costs. Unfortunately if consumers don't educate themselves, they end up paying via ads and marketing.
- karlshea 11y agoIt'll be interesting to see if the quality eventually changes now that Apple owns them.
- mynameishere 11y agoIt seems obvious that the best headphones for any recording are whatever the mixing engineer used. Any seeming improvement caused by other gear suggests a deficiency in either the engineer or one's self (whether in hearing or in equipment.) The answer in most cases would suggest that the consumer has worse taste and worse gear than the professionals. Perhaps every recording should list what headphones were used during the final mix.
- georgebonnr 11y agoActually you'd want the mastering engineer's gear, not the mix engineer. And they both almost never use headphones to do the bulk of their work - it's almost always specialized studio monitors.
- SixSigma 11y agoThen you should be listening with a single speaker FM radio or whatever they use for speakers at Wal-mart. Pop music is made to spread
- secstate 11y agoHaha, isn't that the truth :) Using nice headphones with Top-40 pop music is like using a Ferrari to do the grocery shopping with the kids. If you're gonna listen to it, you might as well do it with your phone speaker turned up as loudly as possible, as that's the purpose of the music, to get as many people listening to it as possible.
- SixSigma 11y agoI said it because when I was in the music industry, we did our final pre-mastering studio mix on a pair of shitty $10 computer speakers - it has to sound ok everywhere, not just on your $1k+ studio monitors
- zaroth 11y agoI wonder exactly how many grams and millimeters smartphones have to be, to get to the point where they are so thin and light they go beyond feeling premium and fall into the valley of "cheap"?
- fmax30 11y agoWait so does this mean, that buying a 10$ Chinese Beats knockoff is as good as buying an original one.
- chrischen 11y agoImpossible, since the Beats are the $10 Chinese-made knockoffs.
- pbreit 11y agoThis is just stupid. The going rate for "good" headphones is $200. Neither article makes any attempt to explain how the supposed corner cutting leads to worse sound. Further, brand name items have always been sold for higher margins and it's always been both a function of quality and aspiration.
- icanhackit 11y agoI think what a lot of the posts on this thread are missing is that Beats is not really a headphone company, it's a jewelry company. And jewelry doesn't need to be made of anything special, it just needs to be rare [0]. The prohibitive cost of Beats is its selling point. Nick Szabo's essay on money Shelling Out - The Origins of Money [1] points out how Wampum in its various forms was worn to signify wealth. Ornamental swords and axes with no utility were flashed around as well. This is nothing new - what's interesting is that we're beginning to see consumer technology take the place of beads, fabrics, stones and metal. [0] Using wampum as an example again – the materials themselves were common however energy was required to collect shells/teeth/furs etc – energy that could otherwise be used to collect food, repair huts, make clothing etc. Money abstracts this cost, but it's still there effectively [1] http://szabo.best.vwh.net/shell.html http://szabo.best.vwh.net/shell.html
- chrischen 11y agoWell as the article points out, the beats didn't require much "energy" to produce either.
- alwaysinshade 11y agobeats didn't require much "energy" to produce I think the point is that the "energy" isn't what was required to make the product, it was the energy expended to acquire the it. Collecting shells means time spent not collecting food. Wearing the shells signifies a kind of wealth where you have an abundance of time and thus an abundance of resources. Spending hard earned money on shitty earphones is a similar kind of wealth.