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Apple Welcomes Beats to the Family as Beats Electronics Closes Its Online Store
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I decided to buy a pair of Beats headphones over he weekend. I agree with people who think $300 is too much to pay for the over-the-ear model, which is why the equivalent of $230 wasn't too bad.
My first couple of days' impression is the people who say they "suck" or are "crappy" don't know what they're talking about. I was able to hear a lot of subtle things in tracks I have heard a million times, and I was never able to overpower them. The build quality seems much better than the $50 Sony noise-canceling pair I had that was almost all plastic and wouldntyaknow broke before I had owned them for too long.
I love the foldability, the detachable cords and the integrated battery. I obviously hope this battery doesn't crap out as easily as some rechargeable AA batteries I own. The inline mic is something I can't believe isn't on every headphone set now. The noise canceling is great, and I didn't get whatever hissing sound a reviewer on Amazon mentioned. I turn it on and a lot of noise just disappears.
If people think differently on value and various sound quality traits, such as bass level, I get that. I love some good bass and these provide that. I don't need perfect reproduction of sound. I'm listening to compressed audio on portable devices.
That leads me to a related point: Maybe this will get Apple to dive into lossless music and/or using better codecs such as DTS. I was finally able to kind of tell that some songs are not all there. I could really sense a lack of some quality, especially in older recordings. But I'm not going to carry around a CD player, and I'm not going to start cluttering up my place with CDs again. This could be a great way for a Apple to separate from the pack in audio offerings and to push high-quality headphones it now sells. Add the ability to download lossless tracks over Beats Music for another $3 or so per month. I'd be interested to hear the difference.
My first couple of days' impression is the people who say they "suck" or are "crappy" don't know what they're talking about. I was able to hear a lot of subtle things in tracks I have heard a million times, and I was never able to overpower them. The build quality seems much better than the $50 Sony noise-canceling pair I had that was almost all plastic and wouldntyaknow broke before I had owned them for too long.
I love the foldability, the detachable cords and the integrated battery. I obviously hope this battery doesn't crap out as easily as some rechargeable AA batteries I own. The inline mic is something I can't believe isn't on every headphone set now. The noise canceling is great, and I didn't get whatever hissing sound a reviewer on Amazon mentioned. I turn it on and a lot of noise just disappears.
If people think differently on value and various sound quality traits, such as bass level, I get that. I love some good bass and these provide that. I don't need perfect reproduction of sound. I'm listening to compressed audio on portable devices.
That leads me to a related point: Maybe this will get Apple to dive into lossless music and/or using better codecs such as DTS. I was finally able to kind of tell that some songs are not all there. I could really sense a lack of some quality, especially in older recordings. But I'm not going to carry around a CD player, and I'm not going to start cluttering up my place with CDs again. This could be a great way for a Apple to separate from the pack in audio offerings and to push high-quality headphones it now sells. Add the ability to download lossless tracks over Beats Music for another $3 or so per month. I'd be interested to hear the difference.
I bet you quite no one who bash about beats have tried them, or they simply were tremendously biased before
There are no double blind studies I have seen which point to the majority of people being able to reliably distinguish between lossless and high quality lossy audio. None.
The old MOG streaming quality was mostly 320k, which is not reliably distinguishable from a CD in controlled tests.
The way the original recording was done, or subsequent remasters, will have a much higher impact on what you hear than high q lossy vs lossless.
Beats should bring back Artist Radio and dump this Sentence nonsense, if they want to keep their users.
I ripped the Apollo 13 soundtrack in ALAC and compared it to the iTunes Plus rip I had already. I've got pretty good ears after a decade in marching bands, but I couldn't hear a difference. I could tell some fidelity issues with some tracks on other albums that were recorded decades ago. But new stuff, if it was at least Apple's 256k quality, I could only maybe almost sense something missing.
So again it's not like the headphones are crap. Have all the debates on value and different features, but they aren't crap.
As far as the Sentence feature on BM, I have no idea what it is. They need something like Top 40 lists like Apple has on iTunes Radio.
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I tried out both Beats and Bose a couple of times. The Bose ones were very nice but didn't seem to get loud enough at full volume. They also weren't on sale. The ones I tried before buying THAT WORKED were Beats Solo. They sounded great. So with 30 days to try them out and return, it sounded like a bet I could make. So far, so good.
I bought some $40 Sennheiser headphones for my dad when he needed some and people talked about how great that brand was. It was decent sound, but again the volume was kind of lacking. Maybe that's just coming from an iOS device, but I knew I wanted something that could blow my head off at full volume. You can always turn it down from that.
These other headphone makers need display models. I'm not spending upward of $100 on headphones I can't try first. It's bad enough that the Beats display was mostly broken units.
It's basically something like Pandora, where you pick an artist and it creates a station of similar artists.
In MOG you had a slider which on the one end played only the artist you selected, and as you moved the slider, it added a larger and larger proportion of songs from similar artists to your radio queue. It was great.
Spotify has something similar, although I am not as enamored with Spotify's selection, which seems to have a lot of covers, some really bad, of popular songs not in their catalog.
Beats has a feature called Sentence, which is basically a really dumbed down and generally completely useless mood selector of sorts. They are welcome to leave Sentence, but without Artist Radio, I am not renewing my subscription.
Unfortunately, I jumped the gun and prepaid for a year
But now I find that without Artist Radio, I listen to Beats a lot less that I did to MOG.Sad to say it, but Spotify is the better service now, because of the removal of Artist Radio. I would not recommend Beats Music in its present state.
