Beats are widely considered to be overpriced for their audio quality. I think it's reasonable to expect the AirPods Max to be as well, but I think the main draw of this product is seamless integration rather than pure audio quality, and the question is whether you're willing to pay a (substantial) premium for that. I expect that many will be.
> Beats are widely considered to be overpriced for their audio quality.
Sound quality is also subjective at a certain level. Not everyone wants flat sound like an audio engineer. I like bassy music and headhphones (which the Beats are known to be).
Now, Beats may still be overpriced since they crossed into fashion, but I'm not a fan of this blanket talk about sound quality like it's always objective.
> Not everyone wants flat sound like an audio engineer.
That's what equalizers are for. The point of your speakers/headphones being as flat as possible isn't because it's the inherently best experience for everyone, it's because it's the most flexible experience. You can take a good set of flat headphone and ram the bass through the roof - it'll still sound great. You can't really do the reverse. You can try to equalize a bass-heavy headphone into something more neutral, but the result is worse overall, and a lot more finicky as a user.
yeah, no, I disagree - I have a pair of Sony's XM2 headphones and even when I set the "bass boost" to +10 they are still not as nice to listen to as my beats studio are. Yeah the beats suck for a lot of other music types, but for some they are still my favourite headphones, and I'd pick them over other brands any day.
Bass is like sugar. Lots of it produces a quick addiction to their consumer, but that doesn't mean they are good. Beats produce loud but muddy basses. Good bass will be more subtle, but at the same time clearer. Try a Sennheiser if you can, especially one over ear with cable. It's too bad right now most of the known brands produce poor quality. My wife was completely amazed when she heard her favourite track through good headphones, she heard new instruments and other things she'd never noticed before. But also be aware that better gear might sound worse when you use it to play bad records, because it will expose the bad quality more clearly.
Regardless of how the bass response is tuned, higher total harmonic distortion is objectively worse than less total harmonic distortion. Headphones are a tool to enjoy audio experiences, and a good tool should get out of the way of said experiences.
Higher total harmonic distortion is an objectively less accurate reproduction of the original sound. But people can have a preference for less accuracy and that is not objectively “worse” except on one single scale that the consumer may not value.
Just like sepia toned prints are objectively worse reproductions of the original picture.
That's a terrible analogy, would you buy a screen that has a fixed perma-filter applied to every input? The whole point of buying headphones that are neutral and accurate in their frequency response is that you can enjoy different pieces the way you want. You can apply any "filter" you want to color an accurate and versatile speaker, but you can't get a pair of beats to clear up the mids or make the bass less boomy.
I said nothing about your preferences, that was the generic "you".
My point is good headphones are neutral and versatile enough that they can do both, just like a good screen can make all sorts of different pictures look good.
It's about versatility and quality in different dimensions, and headphones/speaker that impart too much color to music tend to be very one-dimensional which would limit what you can do with them.
Reminds me of the 'bass boost' feature on a lot of consumer audio stuff going back to the 90s (or earlier)-- most of the time, it obfuscates & distorts the original mix and sounds muddier as a result, but people adapt to it and it sounds normal to them.
There's also the confounding effects of different volume levels producing wildly different mixes, of people's ears/brains responding to frequency ranges differently, and of different music types revealing shortcomings more than others (as anyone who's flinched at pixelated cymbals can attest). All of which make it seem like a more subjective thing because of the complexity of interacting variables.
Regardless, true audio fidelity is something that can be measured to a fairly detailed extent. The fact is, most speakers at most volume levels aren't great at it, just 'good enough'. It mostly boils down to: how much can you tell the difference? Just like with finding that optimal mp3 encoding rate to avoid those damn pixelated cymbals.
Numbers being objectively worse doesn't mean that the experience as a whole is objectively worse. If that was true no one would buy vinyl and the iPod never would have succeeded.
Sound is like food. People like different flavors and that is OK.
Yes, and the truth is that many people seem to enjoy the experience of listening to Beats headphones and enjoy that audio more than the audio from many 'better' headphones.
> Regardless of how the bass response is tuned, higher total harmonic distortion is objectively worse than less total harmonic distortion. Headphones are a tool to enjoy audio experiences, and a good tool should get out of the way of said experiences.
This is why nobody buys tube amps for their guitars. Everybody just wants flawless clean sound with no breakup.
Being "objectively better" on some metric does not mean that the metric matters at all to the target audience.
Uh no. I sometimes use a DSP to introduce harmonic distortion when listening to music. There is also a good chance the producer of the music has also introduced a great deal of intentional harmonic distortion already.
Marketing works, and people will believe that the audio quality is fantastic on awful products because the bass is boosted. They haven't ever used a good product, so they have nothing to compare it with.
Anyone that has tried my headphones that have V shaped sound (flat soundstage gets mixed reactions based on their preference) are blown away by how much better they are than their Beats, and at lower cost.
When people listen to my headphones and feel like they need to re-listen to their entire music collection, because they're hearing parts of the song they never heard before, that's how I know it's not all in my head.
> Sound quality is also subjective at a certain level.
apples != oranges.
subjective sound quality (what I like) is always subjective at any level, and objective sound quality (how well it reproduces an input signal) is always objective at any level.
> the main draw of this product is seamless integration rather than pure audio quality, and the question is whether you're willing to pay a (substantial) premium for that. I expect that many will be.
The main draw is that it's an Apple product, and it is yet another way for the rich and spoiled to signal their wealth
The upgrade pricing is still straight robbery. It's $400 to go from 8GB RAM / 256GB SSD to 16GB RAM / 512GB SSD.
The M1 Macs really just continue Apple's traditional pricing - the base model & price is fine, but the upgrades that you're almost certainly going to want are ludicrously priced and oh hey all the user-upgradability (or any post-purchase upgrades) was removed would you look at that what a total coincidence.
Whaaaaat? 15 years ago takes you all the way back to the PPC to Intel transition, Apple has released tons and tons of price competitive products in that timeframe. Not cheapest, but competitive.
The first Intel Macbook was easily the best and least frustrating Windows Vista computer you could buy at the time. Plus they came with OSX and a slew of great software out of the box that at the time you'd have to pay hundreds of dollars extra for on a PC.
The Macbook Air (even the crappy first revision) was without competition for its time and stayed that way into the early 2010s while everyone else was pushing Netbooks.
The first Retina MBP in 2012 had almost no competition at release with a comparable screen at the same price point.
The first 5K iMac was literally a free computer bundled with the 5k display panel.
The current Mac Pro and the pre-trashcan Mac Pro are/were price-to-performance comparable to other workstation class hardware packages from Dell and HP (they offer less configurations and update less frequently however).
The iPhone SE models are competitive.
The base model iPad typically stands without competition, you either get frustrating garbage on the low end or lower value Galaxy Tabs or ChromeOS or low end Surface tablets (or worse, an ARM based Surface tablet) on the higher end.
The Apple Pencil's price to performance ratio drove down the cost of that entire product segment by popularizing it. Previous $100 stylus options were much worse.
AirPods at their time of release were some of the cheapest completely wireless headphones available (most had behind-the-head wires still).
The new M1 model computers are also now very competitive for the performance they're showing.
Apple basically never competes in a race to the bottom and they rarely offer anything in the lowest tier of product pricing categories and they absolutely don't cater to everyone (especially PC gamers) but for the mid to high end they wouldn't exist if they weren't competitive.
If you consider security updates as a measure of longevity, that’s true for basically every single iPhone. Android are a 2-year device at most if you care about security (and are not a hacker), Apple is a 5-year decice; per usable year, Apple can be much cheaper.
And if you consider resale value, Macs have always been cheaper than competitors. A comparably performing dell was always slightly cheaper, but if you sold it 2-4 years later, the Mac came out ahead. And with the M1, it seems Dell doesn’t even have a sticker price advantage - unless you specifically need Windows, Linux or a configuration Apple doesn’t sell (like 64GB ram in a laptop), Mac seems to be cheaper.
> Android are a 2-year device at most if you care about security (and are not a hacker)
Apple are definitely leading the industry here, but my Samsung S7 (released Feb 2016) got a security update last month (even though Samsung has officially said it's unsupported now).
That’s good to hear. Perhaps thi by a are changing -
But do note that S7 wasn’t much cheaper (if at all) than the comparable iPhone when it came out; and this length of support is unusual for Android.
On the other hand, my 5-year old iPhone 6S got the whole new iOS14 update, and my wife’s 6 year old iPhone 6 seems to still be getting critical security updates occasionally, even though the latest OS that supports it is iOS 12, which was replaced over a year ago.
That’s not true. My first three MBPs (I tend to sell them after 3-5 years years, it’s nice that they hold their value), I specced out equivalent non Mac laptops. For size, screen, storage, ram, CPU, and graphics they were equivalent or lower cost than a non Mac laptop. I can’t comment on the last 5 years because I haven’t done the comparison in a while. That was even accounting for the Apple tax on components like RAM that (at the time) could be upgraded after purchase. Upgrading myself or through Apple, they were still price competitive.
This is really ahistorical. Apple definitely has had a few head shakers, but the "apple tax" is largely overblown.
Sure, they are never interested in the bottom of the consumer market, but that doesn't make them overpriced for what they are; they tend to be competitive with actual competitor units.
For me, they also survived sweaty conditions better than others I'd had before ("sweat resistant" was a joke on a couple of them, did not survive a summer afternoon run in Georgia). I only replaced them because they got washed and now sound very tinny (and are long out of warranty, costs as much to replace with new as to get Apple to replace just the ear pieces).
