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by k-mcgrady 4426 days ago
The comments in this thread are similar to the comments in any Facebook related post on HN. Arrogant. People who likely haven't used the product for more than a few minutes have a concrete opinion on it. You may think Beats suck but they sell $500m of headphones per year. People clearly like the sound they produce even if you think it's shit and overpriced.
1 comments
cheald 4426 days ago
Beats was made popular by the Monster Cable marketing machine, who is specifically known for selling well-marketed overpriced crap. Claiming that they're good because they sell is silly.
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k-mcgrady 4426 days ago
It depends on how you define 'good'. They may not be good for listening to certain genres and they may not have a very balanced sound which a lot of audiophiles desire, but the sound they produce is clearly a sound people want and that is proven by how well they sell. They are not an impulse purchase, they are ridiculously expensive. If people really hated the sound most of them wouldn't buy Beats even with the marketing and fashion aspect.
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w1ntermute 4426 days ago
> the sound they produce is clearly a sound people want

Most people are easily fooled when it comes to audio quality and have no idea what sound they "want", so they have to judge the quality of the product on the basis of marketing/branding and design instead. That's exactly what's happening with Beats.

And it is entirely sustainable because (in the mainstream) headphones are first and foremost a fashion accessory, and neither Beats wearers nor the observers are know a thing about what good audio quality is. As long as they look hip wearing Beats in the eyes of mainstream observers (a phenomenon that doesn't show any signs of abating), it'll continue to fly off the shelves.

As someone else commented above, the job of quality headphones is to reproduce the recorded signal as faithfully as possible - a flat frequency response. If you want enhanced base (for example), that should be done in the software equalizer, before the signal gets fed to the hardware. On an objective level, the audio quality of Beats blows. There's simply no other way to put it. Of course, this is all irrelevant to the unwash^H^H^H^H^H^Huneducated masses.

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