That said, Consumer Reports believes the Samsung model is more functional on iOS than AirPods are when paired to an Android device.
So wouldn't that be a weakness of Android, instead of a weakness of AirPods? iOS offers more functionality for both AirPods AND Galaxy Buds than Android does.
All of the Beats/Apple headphone offerings are relatively low quality from a sound perspective. Beats are for bassheads, Airpods for people who like the functionality and don't care about sound quality. Apple, who claims music is in their DNA, still only offer compressed low-quality audio on Apple Music and at best mediocre audio quality headphones, poor sound capabilities on Macs and iPhones etc. They have never been in the high resolution audio market and prefer to cater to the masses not anyone who is remotely close to being an audiophile. Probably a very accurate analysis by Consumer Reports. Before anyone says I'm an Apple haterl, lets just say I have an iPhone, iPad Pro, 2019 i9 Macbook Pro and the latest Apple watch. Love their products. However when it comes to music streaming/purchase I chose hires music on Quobuz, have Shure KSE 1500 electrostats and use an Astell & Kern SP1000 as the quality from Apple in terms of audio largely sucks.
I am with you on sound quality. But it’s nothing wrong to appeal to the masses (and not just a narrow audiophile market) and say that Music is in their DNA. Music <> hardware sound quality.
I am with you on sound quality. But it’s nothing wrong to appeal to the masses (and not just a narrow audiophile market) and say that Music is in their DNA. Music <> hardware sound quality.
I agree with you that there is nothing wrong with appealing to the masses, however the "Music in our DNA" quote is pretty shallow. Most other streaming services offer a high res option. If music was in their DNA and they cared about it, they could at least offer Apple Lossless on Apple Music and in the store... But as you say, appealing to the majority of the market is OK, made them the Company they are today and enabled them to drive technology forward in many areas. For me there is nothing better than Apple for computer/tablet hardware and software but it would be nice to get the high quality audio in an Apple product not have to delve into separate audio player hardware and/or software when it comes to my own personal choice of listening to music at a "HiRes" level.
All of the Beats/Apple headphone offerings are relatively low quality from a sound perspective. Beats are for bassheads, Airpods for people who like the functionality and don't care about sound quality. Apple, who claims music is in their DNA, still only offer compressed low-quality audio on Apple Music and at best mediocre audio quality headphones, poor sound capabilities on Macs and iPhones etc. They have never been in the high resolution audio market and prefer to cater to the masses not anyone who is remotely close to being an audiophile. Probably a very accurate analysis by Consumer Reports. Before anyone says I'm an Apple haterl, lets just say I have an iPhone, iPad Pro, 2019 i9 Macbook Pro and the latest Apple watch. Love their products. However when it comes to music streaming/purchase I chose hires music on Quobuz, have Shure KSE 1500 electrostats and use an Astell & Kern SP1000 as the quality from Apple in terms of audio largely sucks.
They still haven’t figured out how to deal with Apple as a special case in the wider tech market.
Why should they deal with Apple, or any company for that matter, as a "special" case?
Frankly, I've found CU's ratings to be quite useful, especially when paired with the user reviews. The fact that my experiences differ on some items, both for the better and the opposite, doesn't invalidate their entire ratings system.
All of the Beats/Apple headphone offerings are relatively low quality from a sound perspective. Beats are for bassheads, Airpods for people who like the functionality and don't care about sound quality. Apple, who claims music is in their DNA, still only offer compressed low-quality audio on Apple Music and at best mediocre audio quality headphones, poor sound capabilities on Macs and iPhones etc. They have never been in the high resolution audio market and prefer to cater to the masses not anyone who is remotely close to being an audiophile. Probably a very accurate analysis by Consumer Reports. Before anyone says I'm an Apple haterl, lets just say I have an iPhone, iPad Pro, 2019 i9 Macbook Pro and the latest Apple watch. Love their products. However when it comes to music streaming/purchase I chose hires music on Quobuz, have Shure KSE 1500 electrostats and use an Astell & Kern SP1000 as the quality from Apple in terms of audio largely sucks.
so as a vinyl playing and electrostatic guy (both speakers and headphones), I have to say the combination of standard resolution Apple Music + iPhoneX + AirPods is surprisingly good. Not sure entirely why— I suspect related to Apple tuning and moving DA conversion out of the noisy phone and closer to the ears is the reason. The sound quality is noticeably improved compared to the wired Apple buds. I for one would like a head to head comparison of the two wireless buds. AirPods are great, they are very good for audiobooks and podcasts as well. They are not bass heavy like Beats products. I would only fault them for battery life (I only got two years out of my first generation) and I am now on the second generation. But I almost bought the Galaxy Buds while waiting for the second generation AirPods. I suspect the Samsung product is more bass heavy and that is what appealed to the simpletons of Consumer Reports.
Even as an Apple fan, $129 with a charging case is not a steep price of entry. I may buy them just to extend the battery life of my beloved AirPods by minimizing duration of daily use.
People still give a shit about consumer reports? Really? Not a single human being I know consults them for anything. Not even "recommended"? Fucking laughable. They're an insanely well designed product and work incredibly well.
I see a few hundred people wearing Airpods a day. Insanely popular. Galaxy Buds? Pretty much zero.
I don't usually examine people's choice of earphones, but Consumer Reports has more than 6 million subscribers. That's quite substantial for a publication nowadays. The New Yorks Times has about 4 million.
Of the 6 million how many even own earphones? If you were to look at the average age of their readers you’d probably discover they were not even potential customers.
All of the Beats/Apple headphone offerings are relatively low quality from a sound perspective. Beats are for bassheads, Airpods for people who like the functionality and don't care about sound quality. Apple, who claims music is in their DNA, still only offer compressed low-quality audio on Apple Music and at best mediocre audio quality headphones, poor sound capabilities on Macs and iPhones etc. They have never been in the high resolution audio market and prefer to cater to the masses not anyone who is remotely close to being an audiophile. Probably a very accurate analysis by Consumer Reports. Before anyone says I'm an Apple haterl, lets just say I have an iPhone, iPad Pro, 2019 i9 Macbook Pro and the latest Apple watch. Love their products. However when it comes to music streaming/purchase I chose hires music on Quobuz, have Shure KSE 1500 electrostats and use an Astell & Kern SP1000 as the quality from Apple in terms of audio largely sucks.
Is it really fair to compare with a $3,500 player? us.astellnkern.com/products/a-ultima-sp1000? I understood the fundamental electronics (iPhone/iPod) including the DAC to be well reviewed, and while I use wired pro grade ear buds, I have found lossless output to be excellent on such as Klipshorns...
The only purely objective "quality" measure that CR or any reviewing organization can really make about the sound properties of headphones is sound accuracy. This can be measured using instrumentation and plotted on graphs. As soon as they take even one baby step into the territory of their reviewers personal assessment of how the music "sounded" to them, they've crossed over into subjective and personalized opinions. Sure, they can gather up the opinions of many evaluators as they can round-up and rank their personal and highly subjective feedback. This is a perfectly reasonable popularity contest that ranks the subjective opinions of the reviewer pool. But that's all it will ever be, a popularity contest for a given set of reviewers. Nothing more and nothing less. Unless you evaluate the different options yourself you're left to decide, using some mysterious mechanism or blind trust, whether your personal and highly subjective interpretation of "sound quality" matches the winner of the popularity contest or one of the less popular alternatives.
If you're comfortable making purchases of personal products with highly subjective qualities based solely on other people's opinions, good for you, I guess. But you may want to consider test driving the alternatives yourself and seeing how you like them across all quality factors that the products exhibit. The sneaky thing with Apple is that they seem to find ways to tweak more than one of the quality factors that influence a buyer's satisfaction with a product. They are frequently not the dominant performer on any one given attribute, but they somehow seem to find a way to deliver just enough quality across all of the quality attributes of the product (including aesthetics, convenience, and reliability) to suck you in and make you feel good about your Apple purchase. A product is more than a collection of its components. A set of wireless headphones is more than just sound transducers, sound reproduction circuitry, a miniature radio, and batteries. To determine whether they've pulled everything together into a coherent product that you like, you've really got to personally see it, feel it, play with it, and listen to it yourself. Reading about it in CR or on AppleInsider should pique your interest in trying it out, but do yourself a favor and become your own product evaluator.
First, it wasn’t until Apple showed the way. Par for the course on that one.
Second, sound quality is subjective, but okay, Samsung makes good hardware.
Third, if they’re saying the Samsung product serves the Android market better and AirPods serve the iOS market better, what’s the point?
First. Provably wrong. Samsung intro'd wireless buds before Apple. Apple couldn't have shown the way since Samsung's design for the buds is a continuation of the Icon X design which they've iterated since 2016. Second. Agree completely Third. For those who are not locked in, CR is giving an overall impression. Both products can be used interchangeably across ecosystems. You're trying to take a generality and make it an absolute to support your point. Generally speaking, they serve their ecosystems better. I'd agree, mostly. The specific desires of the individual is going to be the determining factor for each purchase though. Youtuber UrAverageConsumer is an Apple fanboy supreme who uses Galaxy Buds because he says the fit and sound better than AirPods, which doesn't conform to the generality.
People still give a shit about consumer reports? Really? Not a single human being I know consults them for anything. Not even "recommended"? Fucking laughable. They're an insanely well designed product and work incredibly well.
I see a few hundred people wearing Airpods a day. Insanely popular. Galaxy Buds? Pretty much zero.
I used to think CR was a good place to start if looking for a washing machine or a toaster or something similar (certainly not electronics) but they've been a party to recommending so many stinkers in the past decade, I wouldn't subscribe if it were free.
My experience is that they are anti-design-first brands. They hate Dyson as well. Yet I’ve been screwed by buying their recommended Shark that couldn’t do half of what my Dyson can.
Yet AirPods continue to sell very well. You see them everywhere. Same goes for the iPhone. These constant comparison articles don't seem to influence many people either way.
I did however notice that you decided to edit Wikipedia just so you could claim they "both" came out in December:
Incorrect again. It said “DECEMBER 2016. This is a few months before Apple first announced its AirPods.” which was the wrong. I edited it to correctly reflect APs actual release date, December.
You have now edited it from “DECEMBER 2016” to an earlier date. Awesome you failed to include that.
All of the Beats/Apple headphone offerings are relatively low quality from a sound perspective. Beats are for bassheads, Airpods for people who like the functionality and don't care about sound quality. Apple, who claims music is in their DNA, still only offer compressed low-quality audio on Apple Music and at best mediocre audio quality headphones, poor sound capabilities on Macs and iPhones etc. They have never been in the high resolution audio market and prefer to cater to the masses not anyone who is remotely close to being an audiophile. Probably a very accurate analysis by Consumer Reports. Before anyone says I'm an Apple haterl, lets just say I have an iPhone, iPad Pro, 2019 i9 Macbook Pro and the latest Apple watch. Love their products. However when it comes to music streaming/purchase I chose hires music on Quobuz, have Shure KSE 1500 electrostats and use an Astell & Kern SP1000 as the quality from Apple in terms of audio largely sucks.
I won't accuse you of being an "Apple hater," but I do think your perspective is skewed. I am a career music educator. I have taught and presented on digital audio quality. I have a trained ear, sensitive enough to be driven crazy by many compressed audio sources on even mediocre consumer grade equipment.
Having said that, the only way I can agree with the terms "low quality" and "mediocre quality" and "poor sound capabilities" is if one views it from the perceptive of a true audiophile. From virtually any other vantage point, these terms are off base. Sure, you can make the technical case that Apple's streaming is "low quality." But in the real world, even people with trained ears (like me) cannot usually distinguish between their 256kbps compressed files and uncompressed audio....not if listening with consumer grade equipment. It's not just the compression rate, it's the file system and whatever hardware /software they use to encode. For anyone other than a Hi-Fi enthusiasts, 256kbps audio and above is virtually indistinguishable. In fact, double-blind studies show that even audiophiles on the best equipment cannot discern between higher bit depths (above 16) and/or sampling rates above 44k.
As for headphones, I'l limit my comments to AirPods. You can't judge them against reference-quality headphones. They are fully wireless earbuds. They sound great, especially for their size and convenience. I won't get into battery life or fit/water resistance, because we're just going with your comments on sound quality.
I know you mentioned catering to the masses. Let me ask then, how in the hell can the analysis by Consumer Reports be accurate from that perspective? If they want to rate the Samsung buds above the AirPods, that's fine. There may be an argument for that. But failing to even recommend the AirPods? That's complete garbage. Consumer Reports has a terrible history with Apple.
Keep in mind that Samsung now owns Harman International, parent company of AKG and JBL among others.
It is quite clear that their audio engineering capabilities have improved tremendously. I would be surprised if they hadn't released a good headphone/earphone.
Would be the first time a knockoff beats Apple in customer satisfaction. Hard to believe considering the proprietary tech in Airpods. Shame on Apple if this was fair game.
You've mentioned before living in New Orleans, and that IP address identifying whoever made the very improper change is also located in New Orleans.
See above. The wiki already said “DECEMBER 2016”, but incorrectly said AirPods came out months later. AirPods came out December 2016. My edit only reflects the AirPods release date.
Shame you boys don’t know how to use the change history log.
Comments
Regarding this...
So wouldn't that be a weakness of Android, instead of a weakness of AirPods? iOS offers more functionality for both AirPods AND Galaxy Buds than Android does.
But it’s nothing wrong to appeal to the masses (and not just a narrow audiophile market) and say that Music is in their DNA.
Music <> hardware sound quality.
I did however notice that you decided to edit Wikipedia just so you could claim they "both" came out in December:
Frankly, I've found CU's ratings to be quite useful, especially when paired with the user reviews. The fact that my experiences differ on some items, both for the better and the opposite, doesn't invalidate their entire ratings system.
Even as an Apple fan, $129 with a charging case is not a steep price of entry. I may buy them just to extend the battery life of my beloved AirPods by minimizing duration of daily use.
You've mentioned before living in New Orleans, and that IP address identifying whoever made the very improper change is also located in New Orleans.
I understood the fundamental electronics (iPhone/iPod) including the DAC to be well reviewed,
and while I use wired pro grade ear buds, I have found lossless output to be excellent on such as Klipshorns...
If you're comfortable making purchases of personal products with highly subjective qualities based solely on other people's opinions, good for you, I guess. But you may want to consider test driving the alternatives yourself and seeing how you like them across all quality factors that the products exhibit. The sneaky thing with Apple is that they seem to find ways to tweak more than one of the quality factors that influence a buyer's satisfaction with a product. They are frequently not the dominant performer on any one given attribute, but they somehow seem to find a way to deliver just enough quality across all of the quality attributes of the product (including aesthetics, convenience, and reliability) to suck you in and make you feel good about your Apple purchase. A product is more than a collection of its components. A set of wireless headphones is more than just sound transducers, sound reproduction circuitry, a miniature radio, and batteries. To determine whether they've pulled everything together into a coherent product that you like, you've really got to personally see it, feel it, play with it, and listen to it yourself. Reading about it in CR or on AppleInsider should pique your interest in trying it out, but do yourself a favor and become your own product evaluator.
Second. Agree completely
Third. For those who are not locked in, CR is giving an overall impression. Both products can be used interchangeably across ecosystems. You're trying to take a generality and make it an absolute to support your point. Generally speaking, they serve their ecosystems better. I'd agree, mostly. The specific desires of the individual is going to be the determining factor for each purchase though. Youtuber UrAverageConsumer is an Apple fanboy supreme who uses Galaxy Buds because he says the fit and sound better than AirPods, which doesn't conform to the generality.
You have now edited it from “DECEMBER 2016” to an earlier date. Awesome you failed to include that.
My edit:
I won't accuse you of being an "Apple hater," but I do think your perspective is skewed. I am a career music educator. I have taught and presented on digital audio quality. I have a trained ear, sensitive enough to be driven crazy by many compressed audio sources on even mediocre consumer grade equipment.
Having said that, the only way I can agree with the terms "low quality" and "mediocre quality" and "poor sound capabilities" is if one views it from the perceptive of a true audiophile. From virtually any other vantage point, these terms are off base. Sure, you can make the technical case that Apple's streaming is "low quality." But in the real world, even people with trained ears (like me) cannot usually distinguish between their 256kbps compressed files and uncompressed audio....not if listening with consumer grade equipment. It's not just the compression rate, it's the file system and whatever hardware /software they use to encode. For anyone other than a Hi-Fi enthusiasts, 256kbps audio and above is virtually indistinguishable. In fact, double-blind studies show that even audiophiles on the best equipment cannot discern between higher bit depths (above 16) and/or sampling rates above 44k.
As for headphones, I'l limit my comments to AirPods. You can't judge them against reference-quality headphones. They are fully wireless earbuds. They sound great, especially for their size and convenience. I won't get into battery life or fit/water resistance, because we're just going with your comments on sound quality.
I know you mentioned catering to the masses. Let me ask then, how in the hell can the analysis by Consumer Reports be accurate from that perspective? If they want to rate the Samsung buds above the AirPods, that's fine. There may be an argument for that. But failing to even recommend the AirPods? That's complete garbage. Consumer Reports has a terrible history with Apple.
See above. The wiki already said “DECEMBER 2016”, but incorrectly said AirPods came out months later. AirPods came out December 2016. My edit only reflects the AirPods release date.
Shame you boys don’t know how to use the change history log.