i admire the talent needed to sell at such a high price those pieces of junk with may-be 5$ of effective cost. And I wonder how it is possible so many people could buy this thing after ten seconds of listening test ?
Last edited:
The question becomes how do you design a great set of headphones if it is so difficult to actually measure the response accurately? Do you go strictly by subjective testing with well trained listeners or is there some other realistic method to measure a headphone that gives good correlation to subjective listening? I've listened to the Beats headphones and it didn't take more than a few seconds to realize how badly they were weighted to bass with poor mid and high frequency response, with very little top end response. I think a cheap pair of Sony headphones sound much better than the Beats at 1/4 the cost. How do we then say some high end headphones are so good except for subjective opinions, where does the science come into the design when there are so many problems with testing even on an artificial head-form?
My favorite, Koss Porta pro.
I was thinking the same thing than you about difficulties to design an headphone with so little help from measurements.
Each curve shows change in hearing threshold versus frequency with aging, below which that percentile of the population belongs. So no, but I agree the graph is not easy to get ones head around, perhaps.
The sad thing is there are some good engineers at Beats. The word on the street however is that Iovine gets involved at the last minute and insists on changing things.
This used to happen at Harman a lot in the pre-Toole days. Someone would work to get a loudspeaker perfected, within reason, and managers and VPs would come in, say More highs! More lows! and walk out.
This used to happen at Harman a lot in the pre-Toole days. Someone would work to get a loudspeaker perfected, within reason, and managers and VPs would come in, say More highs! More lows! and walk out.
The text says change in hearing and has negative numbers! I read that as an improvement. But I suspect that they are comparing folks of various ages and not tracking the same population. That would leave open the exposure to and the change in environmental noise.
I just got notice of a permit approval after a hearing where I presented evidence of the ambient noise levels. It was very nice listing my creditable evidence as opposed to the oppositions speculation. Bruel and Kjaer meter really deserves the credit.
(The code calls for 45 dBA evening levels and I measured 60 dBa on a Sunday morning at 5:00 A.M. !!! Air conditioner noise from the folks I would have expected to have the strongest objections.)
Last edited:
Perhaps they meant Pot and Ludes!
(There really was a reason why they took a hit in the pro market for a bit.)
The curves do not refer to changes for a particular individual followed during his aging.
They are bulk values, for a whole chunk of population, and some older people happen to hear better than some younger ones ... within limits: above a few KHz, age simply dominates....
Indicators
Maybe a small amount of tweaking and they will visibly glow from the warmth of the sound... and temperature of the device ;-) both figuratively and literally
Or you could use radium in the knobs and dials
Maybe a small amount of tweaking and they will visibly glow from the warmth of the sound... and temperature of the device ;-) both figuratively and literally
Or you could use radium in the knobs and dials
Oh don't get me started on the OCC nonsense. Was the same with OFC, but that buzzword was getting a bit long in the tooth so they needed to come up with a new marketing buzzword.
I know someone else in the headphone cable business who markets his stuff as using OCC. He knows it's a load of BS, but feels he needs to use it in order to get sales. However my headphone cable brand is very highly regarded in spite of my not even using OFC let alone OCC.
It's funny the excuses people will give for throwing their morals out the window.
se
That "breakdown" left a lot out, like the cost to make all the molds to churn out all those molded parts. Sure, that gets amortized out if you're able to sell a boatload of them, but it's still an up front cost that should have been included in the breakdown.
And the Beats Solo 2s don't sound nearly as bad as the original Solos. And their Studio and Pro models aren't so shabby.
So what's a more "high end" headphone? Grados? Nothing special at all about them. And they're just using the same cheap Mylar drivers as the Beats and a bazillion other headphones.
se
Most headphone "design" is just industrial design done around the same basic Mylar drivers that most everyone else is using. There are some examples that go beyond that, but for the most part it's just industrial design.
se
It takes one to fit one !
http://www.diyaudio.com/forums/lounge/279375-failed-parent.html#post4442979
( Period and P.O. )
- Status
- Not open for further replies.