[q7]

Imho beats headphones don't sound good. The bass is ridiculously overpowered and distorts nearly constantly.

Now, tastes are different, and you might want exactly this experience with that distorted bass.

If you create both the music and the speaker, like Dre does, and you wanted that experience, the right approach would have been to add such a distorted bass to your track during mixing/mastering, and then create headphones that faithfully output this signal.

This would ensure that you could enjoy Dre's tracks with that distorted bass on all your music equipment, like with your home hifi system, and if you used the beats headphones with other music, it would also output that other music truthfully.

So it becomes a bit of a standards issue. It's as if a very popular computer displays brand made displays where pixels that are 100% white will flicker wildly, but the displays brand was created by a guy known for his lowpoly wireframe art style, and this particular style looks great on those displays. So that combination might be fine, but you cannot use the displays to faithfully assess other images, really.

[viiralvx]

Yeah, I really concur with the sound quality argument. I got a pair of Beats on the cheap from a friend, but I got tired of wearing them after awhile and eventually switched to earbuds to just listening to my music cause of the sound quality. Ordered a pair of Sennheiser Momentums though, should be getting those by Saturday, so I'm hoping to return to a solid pair of over-ear headphones again.

[icebraining]

Why is a mix of the songs (with extra bass) less "truthful" than the mix made by the record company employee? Both are valid interpretations of the music. If you prefer the former, why shouldn't you listen to it?

[q7]

Oh you can listen to anything you like. Any mix is fine, and any headphones are fine.

When I say truthfulness, I refer to playback equipment. Truthful means that it outputs something that is close to the input.

My argument is that if a headphone doesn't add deliberate distortions, it can be used for all kinds of music, enhancing its utility. And at the same time, with such a more useful headphone, you can still have the same experience as before, if those distortions are added at an earlier time.