I scoured the Beats website and googled for information about the basic frequency response of Beats products (headphones, earbuds, speakers)... not. one. word. about it. A search of the Beats websites for "frequency response" yields "no results".
Seriously nothing, aside from a few third-party DIY audiophiles on Google that made FR graphs comparing various headphones... and those are all over the map.
Every mainstream tech, news, reporting and review outlet is trumpeting the greatness and cool of Beats products (and making money from that song and dance), and yet, not a SINGLE ONE mentions the thing that matters most to these devices: the accuracy of their reproduction. The simplest measure, "frequency response" is non-existent. Instead "what matters" is all tangled up into clever double-speak and marketing copy and "cool"...
What a shallow, horrible scam!
When you are completely hiding the very specifications that make a truly great pair of headphones, and hiding those behind a bunch of highly polished web pages and marketing-speak? That's the worst kind of 'snake oil' salesmanship and misdirection out there.
Either Apple has been taken in by it, or the buy has nothing to do with the headphones (although, judging by the headphone quality of iPods, etc. Apple doesn't seem to have much clarity or much vested there, really. When it comes to headphones, they only seem to practice the Samsung "good enough" approach).
When a product has great "aesthetic" design, but not much else in delivered quality, what good is it? Honestly, what good is an awesome looking, well-manufactured pair of headphones that sound awful? Other than adding to a wardrobe ensemble?
From the few FR graphs I did see by googling it, these are really REALLY bad headphones...
I won't judge until I hear them for myself, but I'm not sure i"m going to bother, considering their clear level of dishonesty (hiding the facts that matter to a product like this).
From what I've seen though, I'm not sure the "real thing" is going to be any better than the knockoffs.............
I'm no fan of Beats but it's no more a scam than the AC unit I had that the manufacturer had zero info about the spec that I wanted, or the external hard drive tech chart that doesn't even tell you the cache or speed of the drive inside. If they don't want you to know it's usually all you need to know.
In Beats' case legit freq response charts are out there, though for sure nowhere on their site, and they're not that hard to find. (Search images instead of web.) Just as a visual they're all so nuts looking that Beats knows that even an untrained eye will compare them to the headphones on the shelf to the right and it won't be good for sales. But it's meaningless to view how incomprehensible their frequency response is for music listening at large. They're marketed directly at rap/hip hop listeners, and that's literally what 90% of those genres charts look like. The Beats models all pretty much have different freq responses, but if you look at, IIRC, their MIXR (might be another one) model's chart (wide, ramped up lows more and below standard headphones, and dropping off at the highs far sooner than "normal" headphones, with a huge crazy spike in the high mids), it's not all that different from other headphones in the same category (DJ) such as the generally well regarded (for their purpose) under $100 Pioneer HDJ-500, which has a similarly ugly looking chart, as do other DJ headphones by others. These will indeed sound awful for classical, folk, country, pop, pop/rock, basically anything else, which needs highs past 8k for acoustic instruments and doesn't want the bass drum to suddenly become the loudest thing in the music by 5x when it wasn't meant to be. Even spoken word, which can survive getting the highs chopped off, loses it's clarity when the lows are cranked so much.
I think the reason people still miss that the enormously selling Beats knows it's not for these other genres and isn't selling them as such is that they can't conceive of a world where rap and hip hop dominate the music world and much of our culture, and is so big that it doesn't need the rest of the music world's/listeners' approval. It's probably mostly because when one is not a fan of something (I am personally not) people tend to ignore and have a wrong perception of how the market pie slices are divided up. Many people still think the size of the slice for music that fits the Beats profile, both literally and their eq profile is a small, niche market, but those days are long gone.
You should, because, damn, you have a ton of Apple shares! Way more than me!" src="http://forums-files.appleinsider.com/images/smilies//lol.gif" />
I don't think that anybody on this forum owns more AAPL than you do.
Your original post came to my email inbox, and I of course saw your entire, extremely detailed financial history of AAPL. You've obviously edited your post since then, but don't worry, I wont divulge any of that information.
If I owned as many shares that you do, then I would demand private concierge service whenever I stepped foot into an Apple store. My head would be much bigger than it already is.
I thought better of it, always a stupid idea to post financials and I really honestly didn't want to seem like I was bragging. I don't have a problem showing off my toys on here though because we all love gadgets. Along with a few other investments we have my family will hopefully be well taken care of for a very long time, here's hoping my kids are smart and will sell AAPL at 600 after a couple of more splits.
I thought better of it, always a stupid idea to post financials and I really honestly didn't want to seem like I was bragging. I don't have a problem showing off my toys on here though because we all love gadgets. Along with a few other investments we have my family will hopefully be well taken care of for a very long time, here's hoping my kids are smart and will sell AAPL at 600 after a couple of more splits.
No worries! I know where you're coming from.
A while back on this forum, some troll called me a liar and said that I didn't own any AAPL shares, so I posted a screenshot from my brokerage app, which showed the purchase of some AAPL shares.
I wont bother to do that again in the future. If somebody on the internet doesn't believe me, then that's fine, I have nothing to prove to them or to anybody else. I didn't see your original post as bragging at all, I was more impressed than anything else.
A while back on this forum, some troll called me a liar and said that I didn't own any AAPL shares, so I posted a screenshot from my brokerage app, which showed the purchase of some AAPL shares.
I wont bother to do that again in the future. If somebody on the internet doesn't believe me, then that's fine, I have nothing to prove to them or to anybody else. I didn't see your original post as bragging at all, I was more impressed than anything else.
It was a lucky buy to start off with, holding on to the shares for this long has been the easy part especially now after the recent 7 to 1 split. Instead of going through a brokerage company I bought them directly using my personal brokerage account and trading ID.
The irony that Beats' genre niche is the one with the least respect for trademarks and copyrights isn't lost. Dr. Dre himself has been in lawsuits involving music lifted in beyond legal amounts from others' works and several have been ruled not in his favor.
It will be interesting to see if he is able to garner enough sympathy to support his newfound concern for the rights of the property owner.
You all might reflect in the fact that many, many audiophiles bemoaned the arrival and subsequent popularity of iPods and its super lossy music in exactly the same way. I wonder if any of you agreed with those assessments, and never bought an iPod. Or, if you did, trashed it.
My guess: you did not. If so, you're a bunch of hypocrites on this issue.
What on earth did my post have to do with what you are saying? Please don't aggregate my post in with non related ones. In my post I simply speculated that Apple most likely were informed of this Beats law suit. If not then ... wow ...!
My apologies. I wanted to take out your post in my quoted reply, but doing it on an iPhone (and on the fly) made it difficult.
I said this when Apple bought Beats, Beats worse competitor is itself in the way of knock offs, China has been knocking them off since day one and you can hardly tell which one are the original and which is the knock off. Unlike when china knocks off a Rolexs or even an Iphone or ipad you can almost immediately tell the they are fakes. With Beats head phones not the case, and most people can care less if they are Beats headphone as long as they look the same is all that matter since it is a fashion statement not a tech statement.
Comments
I scoured the Beats website and googled for information about the basic frequency response of Beats products (headphones, earbuds, speakers)... not. one. word. about it. A search of the Beats websites for "frequency response" yields "no results".
Seriously nothing, aside from a few third-party DIY audiophiles on Google that made FR graphs comparing various headphones... and those are all over the map.
Every mainstream tech, news, reporting and review outlet is trumpeting the greatness and cool of Beats products (and making money from that song and dance), and yet, not a SINGLE ONE mentions the thing that matters most to these devices: the accuracy of their reproduction. The simplest measure, "frequency response" is non-existent. Instead "what matters" is all tangled up into clever double-speak and marketing copy and "cool"...
What a shallow, horrible scam!
When you are completely hiding the very specifications that make a truly great pair of headphones, and hiding those behind a bunch of highly polished web pages and marketing-speak? That's the worst kind of 'snake oil' salesmanship and misdirection out there.
Either Apple has been taken in by it, or the buy has nothing to do with the headphones (although, judging by the headphone quality of iPods, etc. Apple doesn't seem to have much clarity or much vested there, really. When it comes to headphones, they only seem to practice the Samsung "good enough" approach).
When a product has great "aesthetic" design, but not much else in delivered quality, what good is it? Honestly, what good is an awesome looking, well-manufactured pair of headphones that sound awful? Other than adding to a wardrobe ensemble?
From the few FR graphs I did see by googling it, these are really REALLY bad headphones...
I won't judge until I hear them for myself, but I'm not sure i"m going to bother, considering their clear level of dishonesty (hiding the facts that matter to a product like this).
From what I've seen though, I'm not sure the "real thing" is going to be any better than the knockoffs.............
I'm no fan of Beats but it's no more a scam than the AC unit I had that the manufacturer had zero info about the spec that I wanted, or the external hard drive tech chart that doesn't even tell you the cache or speed of the drive inside. If they don't want you to know it's usually all you need to know.
In Beats' case legit freq response charts are out there, though for sure nowhere on their site, and they're not that hard to find. (Search images instead of web.) Just as a visual they're all so nuts looking that Beats knows that even an untrained eye will compare them to the headphones on the shelf to the right and it won't be good for sales. But it's meaningless to view how incomprehensible their frequency response is for music listening at large. They're marketed directly at rap/hip hop listeners, and that's literally what 90% of those genres charts look like. The Beats models all pretty much have different freq responses, but if you look at, IIRC, their MIXR (might be another one) model's chart (wide, ramped up lows more and below standard headphones, and dropping off at the highs far sooner than "normal" headphones, with a huge crazy spike in the high mids), it's not all that different from other headphones in the same category (DJ) such as the generally well regarded (for their purpose) under $100 Pioneer HDJ-500, which has a similarly ugly looking chart, as do other DJ headphones by others. These will indeed sound awful for classical, folk, country, pop, pop/rock, basically anything else, which needs highs past 8k for acoustic instruments and doesn't want the bass drum to suddenly become the loudest thing in the music by 5x when it wasn't meant to be. Even spoken word, which can survive getting the highs chopped off, loses it's clarity when the lows are cranked so much.
I think the reason people still miss that the enormously selling Beats knows it's not for these other genres and isn't selling them as such is that they can't conceive of a world where rap and hip hop dominate the music world and much of our culture, and is so big that it doesn't need the rest of the music world's/listeners' approval. It's probably mostly because when one is not a fan of something (I am personally not) people tend to ignore and have a wrong perception of how the market pie slices are divided up. Many people still think the size of the slice for music that fits the Beats profile, both literally and their eq profile is a small, niche market, but those days are long gone.
You should, because, damn, you have a ton of Apple shares! Way more than me!
" src="http://forums-files.appleinsider.com/images/smilies//lol.gif" />
I don't think that anybody on this forum owns more AAPL than you do.
Your original post came to my email inbox, and I of course saw your entire, extremely detailed financial history of AAPL. You've obviously edited your post since then, but don't worry, I wont divulge any of that information.
If I owned as many shares that you do, then I would demand private concierge service whenever I stepped foot into an Apple store. My head would be much bigger than it already is.
I thought better of it, always a stupid idea to post financials and I really honestly didn't want to seem like I was bragging. I don't have a problem showing off my toys on here though because we all love gadgets. Along with a few other investments we have my family will hopefully be well taken care of for a very long time, here's hoping my kids are smart and will sell AAPL at 600 after a couple of more splits.
I thought better of it, always a stupid idea to post financials and I really honestly didn't want to seem like I was bragging. I don't have a problem showing off my toys on here though because we all love gadgets. Along with a few other investments we have my family will hopefully be well taken care of for a very long time, here's hoping my kids are smart and will sell AAPL at 600 after a couple of more splits.
No worries! I know where you're coming from.
A while back on this forum, some troll called me a liar and said that I didn't own any AAPL shares, so I posted a screenshot from my brokerage app, which showed the purchase of some AAPL shares.
I wont bother to do that again in the future. If somebody on the internet doesn't believe me, then that's fine, I have nothing to prove to them or to anybody else. I didn't see your original post as bragging at all, I was more impressed than anything else.
No worries! I know where you're coming from.
A while back on this forum, some troll called me a liar and said that I didn't own any AAPL shares, so I posted a screenshot from my brokerage app, which showed the purchase of some AAPL shares.
I wont bother to do that again in the future. If somebody on the internet doesn't believe me, then that's fine, I have nothing to prove to them or to anybody else. I didn't see your original post as bragging at all, I was more impressed than anything else.
It was a lucky buy to start off with, holding on to the shares for this long has been the easy part especially now after the recent 7 to 1 split. Instead of going through a brokerage company I bought them directly using my personal brokerage account and trading ID.
The irony that Beats' genre niche is the one with the least respect for trademarks and copyrights isn't lost. Dr. Dre himself has been in lawsuits involving music lifted in beyond legal amounts from others' works and several have been ruled not in his favor.
It will be interesting to see if he is able to garner enough sympathy to support his newfound concern for the rights of the property owner.
My apologies. I wanted to take out your post in my quoted reply, but doing it on an iPhone (and on the fly) made it difficult.
I said this when Apple bought Beats, Beats worse competitor is itself in the way of knock offs, China has been knocking them off since day one and you can hardly tell which one are the original and which is the knock off. Unlike when china knocks off a Rolexs or even an Iphone or ipad you can almost immediately tell the they are fakes. With Beats head phones not the case, and most people can care less if they are Beats headphone as long as they look the same is all that matter since it is a fashion statement not a tech statement.