[drcoopster]

> Mainstream taste in audio is crap. Designing headphones for a target audience that thinks Spotify HQ mode is sufficient is not going to produce a very good product, audio-quality-wise.

Mainsteam taste is what sells products. Obviously you're not part of the target market and should probably just move on.

[theincredulousk]

Spotify HQ mode is not a bad digital source. Do you mean that's all (these) people think is required to get high quality playback?

[tomc1985]

It's not bad but neither is it good. The compression still butchers a lot of sound. It's easy to tell when compared against the original CDs or FLAC backups for certain kinds of music

[spekcular]

Spotify high quality is 320 kps, if I remember correctly. This should be indistinguishable from lossless unless something is weird with the track.

I've done A/B testing with decent headphones (http://abx.digitalfeed.net/list.html) and not been able to tell the difference. Maybe you can, but I'd bet that most people can't, and in any case the result is far from butchery.

[chungus_khan]

320 kbps mp3 is already indistinguishable for most people with most workloads, let alone the much more performant 320 kbps Vorbis that Spotify uses.

A lot of people love to fret about this stuff and convince themselves they can tell for the exact same reasons uninformed people go out and buy $200 cables.

It's also the same as people who install Gentoo so they can tune their CFLAGS to be 0.0000001% faster under certain workloads at the cost of not running on any other machine and crashing inexplicably on occasion.

We all love optimizing things, regardless of the actual real-world benefits.

[tomc1985]

I will have to listen more closely, though last I remember it was like 256kbps.

I've mostly noticed differences in lower frequencies seeming attenuated in electronic bass music, though it is possible that this might be due to mastering (for stream vs CD) or normalization

[tomc1985]

Apple could use their position of product leadership to introduce mainstream consumers to a higher standard of fidelity if they wanted to, particularly at this price. But I guess that would cut into their Beats business and would make Apple Music look worse than it already is, and surely the profits aren't as nice as using plastic(!) drivers

You can get Sennheiser HD280's, where the audio quality is likely worlds apart from these, and earcup padding that attenuates outside noise by something like 30db passively, for $60. Or you could be a doof and buy these Apple cans