This is so common in consumer tech. Is there a name for it? Like how any new TV has horrible motion interpolation and sharpening enabled by default, or the bassiness of Bose/Beats headphones.
It takes time and experience to develop, and the masses on average don't have it. As in, they might have developed taste for a few products, but not most products. Hence, the mass-market products are aimed at people with no taste, because that captures the largest slice of the consumers.
Random examples:
- In A/B tests, the typical personal will rate louder music as better. Hence, all bars and pubs turn their music up to 11, to the point that it's horrendously distorted, causes physical pain, and forces everyone to scream at the top of their lungs to be heard.
- Sugary, salty and fatty foods are consistently rated by typical people as more tasty than foods without them. Hence, all fast-food restaurants load their foods up with those elements instead of more expensive flavourings such as herbs and spices.
- Just look at the typical gaming PC market. RGB LEDs are now almost "essential", despite adding nothing material to the performance or capability of the system other than a garish blinken-light-show. You can't see the gigahertz, but you sure can see the LEDs!
- Cars are perceived to be more sporty if they have a loud exhaust with a deep note to it. So of course, every "sports" car has literal fake exhaust that's "tuned" to make this particular noise.
Or they just have different tastes then you do, which is a far cry from having 'no taste'. People consistently prefer and rate headphones with more bass as more appealing, for example. That's why consumer brands are bass-heavy. It matches the taste of the market. If you need a flat audio profile where the mids and highs and bass are all at the same level you have to pick up a pair of studio monitors.
There is nothing wrong when it comes to subjective taste. However I think there is some level of objectivity to many things that can be applied to an extent. For example, if there is so much bass that much of the other frequencies are not audible, then I think it is an objectively bad setup. Or if your food is prepared with so much sugar/salt/fat/seasonings that you can't even taste the main ingredient, then it's objectively not very good (or at the very least, a waste of the main ingredient).
> Sugary, salty and fatty foods are consistently rated by typical people as more tasty than foods without them
Sweet, salty and/or fatty tastes form a pretty solid basis for many delicious snacks/hors d'oeuvres/desserts - highbrow or lowbrow - though I personally like tangy as well as textures like crunchy, creamy, chewy, spongy; and sometimes other tastes like bitter, savory, or piquant as well. These are tastes that humans (and other creatures) have developed and retained over thousands of years.
Omitting sweet/salty/creamy greatly reduces the scope of cuisine.
> Sugary, salty and fatty foods are consistently rated by typical people as more tasty than foods without them. Hence, all fast-food restaurants load their foods up with those elements instead of more expensive flavourings such as herbs and spices.
I love this one. Want to convince someone with an unsophisticated palette that you are the greatest chef in history? Just start loading everything you make with butter and sugar. Salty and sweet === good to most people.
It's even worse with Harley-Davidson motorcycles. They're not just going for low and loud, they have a specific profile that they tune their engines for. It will be interesting to see what they do if they ever make an electric.
iPhones are definitely aimed at the more discerning, up-market customer. Android meanwhile is for the mass-market.
iPhones have four levels of encryption designed to thwart the likes of the FBI trying to get data out of your confiscated phones. Androids have a checkbox tick that basically says "Encryption: Yes".
iPhones have 1000-nit OLED HDR screens that are colour-managed and calibrated out of the box, and have Dolby Vision HDR system-wide.
Etc, etc...
iPhones are for people that actually care about their privacy, aren't blind, and appreciate the "small touches". Androids are for people that don't mind factory-installed crapware, as long as it's cheap.
You aren't really comparing apples to apples here. Android is an open source operating system used by dozens of different hardware vendors. Crapware is only installed by some vendors. And iphone rarely has the best displays. They usually trade places with a few other Android vendors for best camera. As for security, iphone usually is the best. But it varies with different Android vendors in how well or how poorly they implement security.
The iPhone 13 literally has the best display currently available, and more importantly, it's colour managed correctly. It is manufactured by Samsung, and they use the same panel in their own flagship phone, but they don't colour-manage as well or as consistently, making the iPhone the overall winner in my book. Other Android manufacturers have markedly worse displays in every metric.
The fact that you don't appreciate this just reinforces my point: you don't happen to have "taste" in phone screens. That's okay! I have bad taste in cars, wine, sport, and a bunch of other stuff.
Actually, it just doesn't. Firstly Apple doesn't just use Samsung, they also use BOE and LG panels, so they'd have to be calibrated to the lesser of either.
Unless there is massive unit variance, which is even worse.
wtf is dolby-vision HDR? Sounds like cheap marketing crap like “Extra Bass Boost”
I rock an iphone because the SE is cheap and the camera is good, if I cared about privacy I wouldn’t have a phone with always on microphones and cameras…
NSO group’s Pegasus was cross-platform, so as far as I’m concerned the security point is moot, people buy iphones and androids for various reasons, and it’s easier to judge someone’s “upmarketness” by the stickerprice of their flagship, not the OS it runs…
HDR10 is the crap Samsung invented, which just extends 8-bit colour to 10-bit colour (from 256 shades of intensity to 1024). This is not enough to display smooth gradients when going from the blackest blacks to the brightest whites that a high-dynamic range (HDR) screen is capable of. Hence, it causes visible banding, especially in "blue skies" or similar smooth areas of slowly changing colour.
Samsung worked around this by applying a post-processing filter that smooths out the banding... sometimes. It also almost always smooths away fine detail, ruining the 4K details. (Similarly, their 8K screens appear less detailed than some 4K screens for other but equally silly reasons.)
Dolby Vision uses a more optimal allocation of signal "bits" to the spectrum of colours and intensities visible to the human eye. The ideal is that each colour and each shade would be perfectly evenly distributed, so that "512" would be exactly half as perceptually bright as "1024", etc... The Dolby Vision encoding does this very nearly perfectly, eliminating visible banding without having to hide them by smudging the decoded picture. This optimal colour-volume encoding also means that transforms like scaling or brightness changes don't introduce colour-shifts or relative brightness shifts.
If you've never seen a DV video taken with an iPhone Pro 13 displayed on its OLED, you just don't know what you're missing. Go to an Apple store and play with one for a few minutes.
But seriously, companies like Samsung like to shave 50 cents off their flagship products by not paying DV their licensing fees. They figure that cutting corners like this doesn't matter, because most customers have no taste in image quality anyway, and just want BRIGHTER! COLORS! and nothing else.
They're right.
You don't care, and you're happy to save 50c on a $10K television or a $1K mobile phone.
I hate motion interpolation with a burning passion and have made it into practically a vendetta and will turn it off anywhere I see it by any means necessary, including downloading a remote application onto my phone and using the IR blaster to turn it off in restaurants and waking up in the middle of the night at friends houses to sneakily switch it off.
For whoever what motion interpolation is also known as is the soap opera effect on movies and I agree, it looks terrible but most people don’t get it, it doesn’t bother them at all.
For me personally, 24fps is extremely close to being unable to perceive motion, and in many movies I absolutely can't see the content.
Any pan in a movie is something where my mind absolutely is unable to process the motion and I become unable to see anything at all. With motion interpolation on, I can actually tell what's happening in an action scene.
According to some neuroscience article that was posted in HN recently, some people might percieve reality in "less FPS." Not only that, but as people age, the speed also goes down. Most people I know cannot discern the difference between heavy motion interpolation and it being off. In the same way, I remember when people weren't able to discern between DVD and BluRay quality in 1080p displays. Even today, many people can't see the difference between a Retina display and a 1080p monitor, which blows my mind.
I’ve never owned Bose nor Beats specifically but more generally I find bassiness is a desirable feature rather than a gimmick for dumb consumers.
With room sized speakers it’s not a problem because you’ll have multiple cones dedicated to the low end and usually some subs too. Thus it’s easy to have a rich low end without sacrificing the fidelity of the higher end. But with headphones that’s much harder to pull off. So you either have a flatter sound or a muffled high end. Thus having headphones that can have a super crisp top end while still still producing a rich and deep low end is very much desirable.
> I find bassiness is a desirable feature rather than a gimmick for dumb consumers
It's perfectly reasonable to find bass a desirable quality. Depending on my mood I'll listen to music with lots of bass, or with little bass. However, I've zero desire to intentionally alter the frequency response so I'm hearing something different than the musicians and mixing engineer intended. Instead I'll just listen to appropriate music for my mood/taste.
Intentionally having a non-flat frequency response is equivalent to adjusting the colour space / colour grading of your monitor to not accurately represent colours. You can do it, and there are reasons why you might want to do it temporarily e.g. blue light filtering in the evening. However, doing so permanently without a specific (medical?) reason is a bit unusual.
> However, I've zero desire to intentionally alter the frequency response so I'm hearing something different than the musicians and mixing engineer intended.
I’ve done a lot of research on this as a recording artist myself and what you’re saying here is a misunderstood meme.
Eg Half the records released before 80s have been remastered to sound different to what the musicians originally recorded.
Plus any medium adds colour, vinyl adds warmth to the playback, digital formats (unless you’re using lossless, which most people don’t) add artifecting, etc. Songs are often written for their preferred medium.
So there isn’t really an exact “as intended” but rather a broader “Goldilocks zone” (for want a better term). This is especially true if you listen to a broad variety of genres.
You’ll also find that most songs record in the last 20 years will be compressed to hell and back so they sound good regardless of how shitty the sound systems are in peoples homes and cars. This isn’t an artistic decision, it’s what producers and sound engineers do to make records sound good for the lowest common denominator. It’s also part of the reason why live music sound better (if the gig or club has a half decent sound engineer anyway).
> Intentionally having a non-flat frequency response is equivalent to adjusting the colour space / colour grading of your monitor to not accurately represent colours.
Some content is actually deficient in some spectrums due to the limitations of the media or technologies of the era. Those limitations were intended to be compensated by speakers that added that colour. There’s a reason why studio monitors with zero frequency curve are less common to for rock
fans than acoustic speakers (for example).
Lastly it’s also worth noting that not everyone’s ears hear spectrums equally. Our ears don’t have a zero frequency curve and that curve will differ from person to person. Which is why some of the best headphones out there are ones that profile your hearing and then perform post processing on the music based on your hearing profile.
Already discussed that point: those have been remastered for CD and thus sound different to the original recorded versions.
If you’re a purist like the GP then you wouldn’t listen to the CD versions. Of course, in practice most people are not that much of a purist. Which is why the whole meme of “as the artists intended” is largely hypocritical posturing.
If I hadn't been gifted a pair of beats earbuds, I could see myself believing similarly. The ones I was given were very nicely built, with tactile components that felt of significant quality, as though they were assembled with great care. They were also the muddiest, mushiest, and most unpleasant listening experience I've had in the last couple of decades outside of bad laptop / phone speakers or scenarios that used explicitly damaged components. When I first got them I thought that I had received a bad pair, only to find online that the sound profile was intentional.
Obviously shit earphones are going to sound shit. That’s true whether they’re bass heavy or not. So its a sentiment that is not contradictory to my point.
My point is having earphones and headphones that can offer a deep and rich low end without sacrificing sharpness a not novelty feature. And there are earphones and headphones out there that can do that. I know this because I’ve owned plenty over the years. :)
For a camera it would just be referred to as post processing. You can even see some of this going on when you open the photo immediately after taking it and see it snap in to high quality later. Or the difference between the live viewfinder and the final image.
It takes time and experience to develop, and the masses on average don't have it. As in, they might have developed taste for a few products, but not most products. Hence, the mass-market products are aimed at people with no taste, because that captures the largest slice of the consumers.
Random examples:
- In A/B tests, the typical personal will rate louder music as better. Hence, all bars and pubs turn their music up to 11, to the point that it's horrendously distorted, causes physical pain, and forces everyone to scream at the top of their lungs to be heard.
- Sugary, salty and fatty foods are consistently rated by typical people as more tasty than foods without them. Hence, all fast-food restaurants load their foods up with those elements instead of more expensive flavourings such as herbs and spices.
- Just look at the typical gaming PC market. RGB LEDs are now almost "essential", despite adding nothing material to the performance or capability of the system other than a garish blinken-light-show. You can't see the gigahertz, but you sure can see the LEDs!
- Cars are perceived to be more sporty if they have a loud exhaust with a deep note to it. So of course, every "sports" car has literal fake exhaust that's "tuned" to make this particular noise.
Etc, etc...
It's all down to bad taste.