How do audiophile consumers rate and rank over-ear headphones? I'm wondering what criteria they use. I'm talking about good quality cans for listening to music, not fashion statements.
Generally speaking, the audiophile world falls into two camps. Those that think particular makes and models of audio electronics and speakers are somehow "magic" and those that simply want their systems to measure "flat". The first camp are the ones that used to put weights on their speakers, used "magic" green markers to color the vertical edge around the outside of a compact disc, and would spend tens of thousands of dollars on a plinth for their turntable or a magic tube driven preamp.
The rest are simply concerned with scientific measurement of the system. Does it produce a reasonably flat sound in frequency and phase that remains undistorted at volumes at which they listen to music.
The latter camp will highly rate headphones (or any other piece of audio equipment) that can produce a the full bandwidth of human hearing while keeping distortion low over a useful range of amplitude.
Comfort, cost, and construction quality would also be considered in the ranking.
Maybe, but in this case at least GP is not wrong to do so, merely lacking a little in nuance, in that on the "measurement" side, not everybody is looking for the flattest possible response.
On the whole, though, there absolutely is a sort of "audiophile" who spends thousands and thousands of perfectly good dollars on completely ridiculous paraphernalia, because a combination of placebo effect and escalating commitment convinces him that it makes his music sound better. I don't have time to dig up a complete selection of background for you, but here's a good place to start, with a fair selection of jumping-off points for further study:
The major difference between the fellow described in this article, and the more usual sort of placebo audiophile, is that this fellow happened actually to be an electrical engineer, and thus capable of demonstrating to himself that he was full of it. Unfortunately, such acumen seems to be rather rare.
I'm not an audiophile (as I understand the perjorative, anyway) but I have spent a long time (20+ years) wearing headphones professionally. Yes, often at a desk, but also in the field or in a theater monitoring recording or playback.
What I look for is simple: comfort, durability, isolation (in both directions), neutrality. In that order.
Comfort - I swear by circumaural designs. Some people apparently don't have a problem with pads resting on the pinna, but I find this painful after an hour or two. Isolation is also worse with supra-aural designs.
Durability - most headphones break quickly. The cables are usually the first to go, around the strain relief on either end. I've had some pairs that used a 1/8" minijack on one of the earpieces, making the cable replaceable - until the jack failed and couldn't be replaced without breaking open the earpiece. Good headphones will survive any reasonable drop; really good ones will survive being drop-kicked.
Isolation - if you can't hear the signal over environmental noise, why bother monitoring? If you're recording or working in a theatrical environment, you don't want your headset audio leaking out either. In an office setting, nobody wants to hear your music, no matter how awesoem your jams are. Closed-ear designs are the way to go.
Neutrality - Relatively flat frequency response. But this is way down the list of priorities for me. A great sounding set of headphones that breaks after 2 months, or is uncomfortable to wear, or doesn't block the sound of your workstation's fans is not a great set of headphones.
tl;dr - Beyerdynamic DT250 is my headset of choice. My current pair is almost 15 years old and the only thing that's failed on them is the pleather on the headband, which has fallen off its fabric backing. Still on the original earpads and cable, and they're as good as the day I bought them. Stay away from consumer brands and models; like fast-fashion clothes, they are not built to last.
(This is also why you should buy your cookware from a restaurant supply store, not williams-sonoma.)
All true, but as far as listening to music goes, it's a pity the DT250s don't sound better - to me they make the bottom end sound like the proverbial bag of hammers. I tried the DT150s, which sound better but I didn't find nearly as comfortable over long periods, and eventually settled on a pair of DT770 Pro, which seem to me to be about perfect for comfort, and a good balance of sound quality and isolation.
To offer a counterpoint - I use a set of cans with no isolation at all. I prefer the broader sound stage (it feels more like an open air concert than a band in your bedroom) that the open cans offer.
I purchased a set of HIFIMan cans with planar drivers on sale for around $500, and I haven't looked back. They sound better than any other >$1000 cans I've listened to, bar none.
That said, they offer no isolation whatsoever, so you do need a quiet environment in which to use them.
I compare live performance of classical music at Seattle Symphony with good recordings of the same piece as heard on speakers and headphones.
The most telling parts are about getting the details from faint instruments, especially at lower volumes. For example the opening part of Beethoven's 9th has very faint sound of violins, and it's often missing on consumer-grade speakers. Ideally I would also compare how wide is the stage and thus how well the instruments are separated, but I don't have the budget for that kind of equipment, if that exists at all.
For my budget, I ended up getting a pair of studio monitors Event 2020bas for speakers, and Etimotic Research as in-ears headphones. YMMV.
This is a good system, though I tend to use my own MP3 player and a couple of albums that I know really well from my hi-fi (which has small but high-quality studio monitors). The key point is to listen for details and the separation between instruments. If you just listen to the music, the human ear/brain is far too good at filling in the missing bits...
I'm not sure any headphones can give you a proper 3D sound stage of the sort that you can get with good loudspeakers (especially the LS3/5a). For that, I use recordings of Shostakovitch's string quartets to see how well I can locate (and distinguish between) four instruments.
Although I'm not fond of it as music, Ravel's Bolero is also a good test track for headphones, because of the way the same theme is repeated by many different instruments.
I use Audio-Technica ATH-ANC7b noise-cancelling headphones, but I don't think there's one headset that suits everyone, any more than there's one pair of speakers, or one car....
Thank you, I'm off to look for Shostakovich quartets.
Any particular recording you would advise? I mean a specific record of known-good quality, preferably on iTunes, Amazon, or similar. I often find myself spending a lot of time listening to different records of the same piece, just to make sure I get a good one.
I use the Borodin (original members) version because they're the ones I know best. I'm sure alternative versions, or the Beethoven or Bartok string quartets, would also do the job, possibly better.
One strike against this set is that most or possibly all of the CDs have been produced from LPs. Having bought the vinyl versions (twice!) many decades ago, this is good for me but not so good for you.
I work professionally with audio to some extent, and I can hear the difference between 320 and wav in some cases (on my own home setup, of course) — but if a layperson asks, I'd advice them to buy Beats instead of professional monitor headphones which have better sound quality for less money. It's simple: if you can't tell the difference between 192 and 256, and are going to listen to Spotify stream anyway, it makes more sense to invest more into the appearance than in sound.
> It's simple: if you can't tell the difference between 192 and 256, and are going to listen to Spotify stream anyway, it makes more sense to invest more into the appearance than in sound.
a) Good headphones only bring marginally better sound over mediocre ones for most of the source material and format people hear (not to mention if you listen to pop hits, they're often mastered to sound good to mediocre headphones in the first place).
b) Appearance matters. Being trendy and following fashion is good for your social life (yeah, other people are often that shallow: don't fight it, hack it to your benefit).
c) For most people their social life is way more important than something like better frequency response. So optimize what's actually important to you, not what should be important in theory.
Heck, I'm a heavy DAW user and I have AKG and AT monitor-grade headphones, but I'm still tempted to get a pair of Beats, a) to hear mixes through a headphone "in vogue" producers of pop/hip-hop/r&b optimize for, b) for the fashion part.
(And no, "everybody has one" doesn't diminish the fashion factor, except to fashion snubs people who you'd want to avoid anyway. Fashion works better when you conform -- to put it another away, nobody was seen in a bad light wearing Nike because "tons of other people have Nikes").
In my opinion bad headphones will have a bigger impact on the sound than the difference between a 192 and 320 mp3. Sure, on a 192 a practiced listener might be able to discern compression in things like cymbal washes, but bad headphones can wreck the whole balance of a track by boosting bass to ridiculous levels etc.
> Good headphones only bring marginally better sound over mediocre ones for most of the source material and format people hear
I have to disagree here. Perhaps it's just me, but when I listen to my music downloaded from iTunes over crappy headphones, then over my good headphones, there is a tremendous difference. I can hear synth beats, quiet drum hits, vocal inflections, and guitar riffs on the good headphones which are lost to the muddled and over-driven bass in bad headphones.
And this is with recent music by Taylor Swift, Adelle, and Avicci.
> Appearance matters.
Thankfully, companies like Sennheiser have started to make tremendous leaps in these qualities. Of course, they're starting to drive up their prices as well, so that's a bit of a backslide...
> So optimize what's actually important to you
Agreed. Though it wouldn't hurt to expose folks to more good sounding headphones, so they can make a decision on actual data. If I didn't have headroom in my home town, I wouldn't know what truly good headphones would sound like; my experience would have been limited to Boise and Beats.
I don't assume — may be I didn't state this in the most correct way. I ask the person about his listening habits and fashion sense when giving advice, of course. Often, brands like SkullCandy or UrbanEars are aesthetically closer to a person's style; Beats is just a good illustration of a principle.
The difference between different headphones is often easier to tell than the difference between different file formats/encodings.
Also, if you care about the social signals, don't buy Beats if you don't want to look like someone with more money than sense ;) (Mileage obviously may vary between environments, but it seems like the one things most people know about headphones is "Beats aren't good for the price", even if they never really looked at the topic in detail)
How do Beats compare to e.g. the cheapest Sennheiser cans?
My go-to headphones are the HD201, which you can get for about $30. They're the best headphones/earphones I've ever used, but I'm no audiophile, as you can tell from that fact.
Love the 201, so much in fact I bought 202's and 205's for different places and actually liked the 201's better, all sounded the same to me and the 201's are so comfy particularly compared to the 203's.
I disagree - I think the Sennheiser HD201 cans look pretty decent. Now granted, they don't have the Beats logo on them, but they do have the Sennheiser logo.
I struggle to hear a difference between 320 and wav, doubt I would get it right in a blindfold test. It's more of a psychological thing for me - prefer to listen to FLAC (or vinyl/cd) because I know it's "all there" :)
I have a pretty good monitoring environment and headphones. What cues do you listen to to differentiate 320?
Sharp 20 kHz LPF that is present in almost all lossy codecs. The 20+ kHz gives you the certain feeling of "air", but doesn't actually affect the music quality in the meaningful way.
At least if you're sitting at a computer it seems worth getting a better DAC before crazy-pricey headphones. I was quite surprised how much for example http://hifimediy.com/sabre-dac-uae23 improved sound over Intel/Dell motherboard output.
Unfortunately many PC motherboards ship with really poor DACs. If you use an iPhone, or an iMac, don't bother though. Their DAC are truly excellent. The only reason to upgrade would be if you have high-impedance headphones, or low-sensitivity headphones that require a more drive than these DACs can produce. Note though that the iMac DAC has higher output that most cheap external DACs, so chose accordingly.
This is the only reason to get a different DAC. These DACs have lower output impedance than most DACs under $500.
I tried that one I linked above on my macbook pro retina (2013?) and it seems _slightly_ better. Nowhere near the difference to my work Dell though. Guess laptop parts are more constrained too.
I'm pretty sure that Apple's x86 systems use the same HD Audio codecs everybody else is using. They may or may not have better analog output amps (if they have any, but iirc at least some laptops have such) but as for using better DACs - links or it didn't happen.
I can't justify that kind of outlay. I've managed to strike a decent balance between price and quality - Sennheiser PX 100 [1] for foldable headphones (not suitable for office use as they leak a lot of sound) or Audiotechnica ANC33is [2] for noise-cancelling & office use
They're well built, reasonably sturdy (although I've crushed the AudioTechnica ones accidentally) relatively affordable and replacement (parts/products) are available easily. And they sound good.
Of course not - that's why I listed some criteria that I use to judge the subjective quality of headphones. If fashion is important to you, you might choose differently.
This advice makes no sense. Beats headphones are poor headphones at their price range. You can get cheaper headphones which are far better, in fact you can get really, really cheap headphones which are better.
So why buy beats? The appearance argument is ridiculous, you can get cheaper, better headphones, that look (and are built) better. Beats don't excel at anything, they just make you look like a fool. I guess that's a feature!
I tend to disagree: the occlusion predictions of the encoder should usually be more accurate when the decided signal it's played through a high quality output chain than when played through a chain that does all kinds of intentional and unintentional signal mangling post-codec.
This surely does not rule out the possibility that certain classes of compression artifacts are lost only on low end headphones, but I really would not give compressed sources a free pass on wonky headphones. If you listen to compressed audio, you don't want post-codec inaccuracies.
The sad part about the headphone market - especially over the ear models - is that the sound they produce is so far from natural, that no one knows what thinks actually sound like anymore. Beats headphones are a perfect example and are probably the worst offender of them all. This ends up affecting everyone - even those of us who choose a pair of headphones that are "flat" or better at being acoustically transparent. Just as recording and mastering engineers learned to change the sound of their albums to sound better on small little "boom boxes" in the 80's and early 90's, today they alter the sound so they work on these grossly inaccurate headphones.
Earlier this year I was looking for the flattest (least "colored") pair of headphones I could get for under $100 and after lots of reading finally went with the ATH-M40x. You all might have seen this model headphone go on sale now and again with mic bundles on Amazon/B&H, and wondered if these headphones are any good. This video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udLoAV7YmjA&feature=youtu.be...] (linked to 83s) really puts into perspective how muddled - aka "colored" - the popular pairs of headphones can sound.
I was skeptical of how this works - how do you record what the headphones sound like? This must surely be fake. However here is the making-of video and it really put into perspective for me how detailed sound engineering can get: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jnK1Gq7txYA
>Beats headphones are a perfect example and are probably the worst offender of them all.
Still Beats are much better than 99% of the headphones people use there, especially cheapo in ear models, and most everything the mass market used with their "walkmans" in the 80s and 90s.
I dunno. I've always been a big headphone evangelist, have owned a few pairs of not-bad cans like the ATH-M50s and HD280Pros, but I've been using a $10 pair of IEMs lately (I think the first pair was Phillips and then I bought a Sony pair). To my ears (and I'm fairly sensitive to this) they sound about 80% as good as my ATH-M50s and they actually isolate a little better. I'd assumed most earbuds would be awful tinny pieces of plastic like the Apple earbuds but I was blown away. I suggest giving it a shot if you have $10 to experiment with potentially large convenience gains for only a mild loss in fidelity.
I have a $180 pair of in-ears, an ATH-M50s and a AKG pair and I don't think the in-ears go anywhere near these (which while monitor-grade, they're not really high end monitor headphones). As for cheap in-ears, I never had much luck with any model.
soundmagic e10 are pretty good as far as cheapie IEM's go.
I use mainly Sennheiser HD650 for audio work but for listening the soundmagic's are pretty nice. I use them with Comply foams to block out some noise and get a tighter fit/better bass
I like the eagerness to experiment for such little cost. Such an idea strikes me as a way to get a little extra colour out of a common activity like listening to music.
I see it more as a functionality thing. I bought them initially for exercise -- I got tired of running with headphones on. These days I mostly use headphones in three situations: exercise, commuting (on the subway) and while working. The train's heavy environmental noise makes sound quality matter less than isolation, and earbuds can fit in my pocket. Plus, as I mentioned above, they sound better than I expected and I don't mind using them on the train even for an hour or two if I'm taking a long trip. Music while working is mostly about comfort and isolation, as I'm hopefully working instead of actively paying attention to the music.
If I'm planning on actively listening to music or doing production work, I use my nice speakers or a pair of monitoring headphones. But that's a much less common scenario for me.
The thing is, lows are exaggerated for a reason: people like saturated low end. If they heard a flat and a extra-bass headphone, they'd more likely buy the second.
I agree, but I think you're forgetting something that gets lost in the age of digital music: for some 'what things actually sound like' isn't hard to describe.
If I want to know how a piano sounds, I'm going to listen to an actual piano. If my recorded and played backed piano sounds any different than that, it's not 'how a piano sounds like'.
Apart from that and having owned HD600s, ATH-M40x, E-10s and a pair of AKGs, I'm in agreement with the parent and most of the following posts. Don't buy beats, any of the mentioned headphones here will blow you away for a lot less money.
What I would like are in-ears that almost completely block outside noise. With some better foam to physically block out the noise, and better noise canceling algorithms, maybe with deep learning. Saw this for cars but nothing for headphones yet
I use etymotic in-ear headphones with the two-flange tips (I prefer the rubber flanges over foam) and they do a remarkable job at isolating from external noise, allowing me to listen to music at a quiet (read non hearing loss inducing) level.
Shure and Westone both offer great IEMs (in-ear monitors) which have foam tips that block around 30db of external sound, and offer good-to-great representation of the source material.
A few years back I worked in an open office setting and I went a little headphone crazy. I bought 4 pairs of over the ear headphones, and 5 pairs of in-ear headphones. I read all the forums and reviews. I even bought two headphone amps!
I ended up with a pair for home, pair for travel, pair for work, and a pair that go in my laptop case. I gave the other pairs to friends and family.
Headphone preference is just as much a personal preference as it is picking the 'best' ones. Some just aren't comfortable on certain shape/size heads or ears. You might just not like how certain pairs sound.
I bought a pair of B&W P7s for $349 (AUD, RRP is $649). I was fortunate to get mates rates on a clearance item. Had been thinking about it for a while. The sound quality is incredible and you certainly can justify spending money here if you're at all passionate about audio. I listen to a lot of lossless with them and they sound superb.
Conversely, from listening to Beats I've found them to be overly cheap feeling and the sound quality isn't on par with their competition.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 121 ms ] threadI'm sure this has been discussed on HN before.
The rest are simply concerned with scientific measurement of the system. Does it produce a reasonably flat sound in frequency and phase that remains undistorted at volumes at which they listen to music.
The latter camp will highly rate headphones (or any other piece of audio equipment) that can produce a the full bandwidth of human hearing while keeping distortion low over a useful range of amplitude.
Comfort, cost, and construction quality would also be considered in the ranking.
On the whole, though, there absolutely is a sort of "audiophile" who spends thousands and thousands of perfectly good dollars on completely ridiculous paraphernalia, because a combination of placebo effect and escalating commitment convinces him that it makes his music sound better. I don't have time to dig up a complete selection of background for you, but here's a good place to start, with a fair selection of jumping-off points for further study:
http://goodmath.scientopia.org/2011/12/30/audiophiles-and-th...
The major difference between the fellow described in this article, and the more usual sort of placebo audiophile, is that this fellow happened actually to be an electrical engineer, and thus capable of demonstrating to himself that he was full of it. Unfortunately, such acumen seems to be rather rare.
... oh wait.
What I look for is simple: comfort, durability, isolation (in both directions), neutrality. In that order.
Comfort - I swear by circumaural designs. Some people apparently don't have a problem with pads resting on the pinna, but I find this painful after an hour or two. Isolation is also worse with supra-aural designs.
Durability - most headphones break quickly. The cables are usually the first to go, around the strain relief on either end. I've had some pairs that used a 1/8" minijack on one of the earpieces, making the cable replaceable - until the jack failed and couldn't be replaced without breaking open the earpiece. Good headphones will survive any reasonable drop; really good ones will survive being drop-kicked.
Isolation - if you can't hear the signal over environmental noise, why bother monitoring? If you're recording or working in a theatrical environment, you don't want your headset audio leaking out either. In an office setting, nobody wants to hear your music, no matter how awesoem your jams are. Closed-ear designs are the way to go.
Neutrality - Relatively flat frequency response. But this is way down the list of priorities for me. A great sounding set of headphones that breaks after 2 months, or is uncomfortable to wear, or doesn't block the sound of your workstation's fans is not a great set of headphones.
tl;dr - Beyerdynamic DT250 is my headset of choice. My current pair is almost 15 years old and the only thing that's failed on them is the pleather on the headband, which has fallen off its fabric backing. Still on the original earpads and cable, and they're as good as the day I bought them. Stay away from consumer brands and models; like fast-fashion clothes, they are not built to last.
(This is also why you should buy your cookware from a restaurant supply store, not williams-sonoma.)
I purchased a set of HIFIMan cans with planar drivers on sale for around $500, and I haven't looked back. They sound better than any other >$1000 cans I've listened to, bar none.
That said, they offer no isolation whatsoever, so you do need a quiet environment in which to use them.
The most telling parts are about getting the details from faint instruments, especially at lower volumes. For example the opening part of Beethoven's 9th has very faint sound of violins, and it's often missing on consumer-grade speakers. Ideally I would also compare how wide is the stage and thus how well the instruments are separated, but I don't have the budget for that kind of equipment, if that exists at all.
For my budget, I ended up getting a pair of studio monitors Event 2020bas for speakers, and Etimotic Research as in-ears headphones. YMMV.
I'm not sure any headphones can give you a proper 3D sound stage of the sort that you can get with good loudspeakers (especially the LS3/5a). For that, I use recordings of Shostakovitch's string quartets to see how well I can locate (and distinguish between) four instruments.
Although I'm not fond of it as music, Ravel's Bolero is also a good test track for headphones, because of the way the same theme is repeated by many different instruments.
I use Audio-Technica ATH-ANC7b noise-cancelling headphones, but I don't think there's one headset that suits everyone, any more than there's one pair of speakers, or one car....
Any particular recording you would advise? I mean a specific record of known-good quality, preferably on iTunes, Amazon, or similar. I often find myself spending a lot of time listening to different records of the same piece, just to make sure I get a good one.
One strike against this set is that most or possibly all of the CDs have been produced from LPs. Having bought the vinyl versions (twice!) many decades ago, this is good for me but not so good for you.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Shostakovich-String-Quartets-1-13-D/...
One thing about newer recordings is that they may well be closer-miked and not have such a "natural" sound stage.
I'm unable to understand this kind of logic
a) Good headphones only bring marginally better sound over mediocre ones for most of the source material and format people hear (not to mention if you listen to pop hits, they're often mastered to sound good to mediocre headphones in the first place).
b) Appearance matters. Being trendy and following fashion is good for your social life (yeah, other people are often that shallow: don't fight it, hack it to your benefit).
c) For most people their social life is way more important than something like better frequency response. So optimize what's actually important to you, not what should be important in theory.
Heck, I'm a heavy DAW user and I have AKG and AT monitor-grade headphones, but I'm still tempted to get a pair of Beats, a) to hear mixes through a headphone "in vogue" producers of pop/hip-hop/r&b optimize for, b) for the fashion part.
(And no, "everybody has one" doesn't diminish the fashion factor, except to fashion snubs people who you'd want to avoid anyway. Fashion works better when you conform -- to put it another away, nobody was seen in a bad light wearing Nike because "tons of other people have Nikes").
I have to disagree here. Perhaps it's just me, but when I listen to my music downloaded from iTunes over crappy headphones, then over my good headphones, there is a tremendous difference. I can hear synth beats, quiet drum hits, vocal inflections, and guitar riffs on the good headphones which are lost to the muddled and over-driven bass in bad headphones.
And this is with recent music by Taylor Swift, Adelle, and Avicci.
> Appearance matters.
Thankfully, companies like Sennheiser have started to make tremendous leaps in these qualities. Of course, they're starting to drive up their prices as well, so that's a bit of a backslide...
> So optimize what's actually important to you
Agreed. Though it wouldn't hurt to expose folks to more good sounding headphones, so they can make a decision on actual data. If I didn't have headroom in my home town, I wouldn't know what truly good headphones would sound like; my experience would have been limited to Boise and Beats.
I wouldn't call friend someone that recommends me something like that
Why do you automatically assume that the most important thing about headphones is "look" for everyone?
Also, if you care about the social signals, don't buy Beats if you don't want to look like someone with more money than sense ;) (Mileage obviously may vary between environments, but it seems like the one things most people know about headphones is "Beats aren't good for the price", even if they never really looked at the topic in detail)
My go-to headphones are the HD201, which you can get for about $30. They're the best headphones/earphones I've ever used, but I'm no audiophile, as you can tell from that fact.
Beats look a lot better, for once.
Even better, they sound good too.
I have a pretty good monitoring environment and headphones. What cues do you listen to to differentiate 320?
This is the only reason to get a different DAC. These DACs have lower output impedance than most DACs under $500.
Edit: http://www.kenrockwell.com/apple/iphone-5/audio-quality.htm
I'm pretty sure that Apple's x86 systems use the same HD Audio codecs everybody else is using. They may or may not have better analog output amps (if they have any, but iirc at least some laptops have such) but as for using better DACs - links or it didn't happen.
1: http://en-au.sennheiser.com/stereo-headphones-travel-lightwe...
2: http://eu.audio-technica.com/en/products/product.asp?catID=5...
How do you define headphone quality? Do you think that this definition is the same for everyone?
So why buy beats? The appearance argument is ridiculous, you can get cheaper, better headphones, that look (and are built) better. Beats don't excel at anything, they just make you look like a fool. I guess that's a feature!
For a lot of people, how headphones look is far more important that difference in sound quality they won't be able to perceive.
But... Spotify streams at 320kbps (Vorbis), which is WAY more than enough until you start spending $500+ on your setup.
Why is that even relevant?
This surely does not rule out the possibility that certain classes of compression artifacts are lost only on low end headphones, but I really would not give compressed sources a free pass on wonky headphones. If you listen to compressed audio, you don't want post-codec inaccuracies.
I was skeptical of how this works - how do you record what the headphones sound like? This must surely be fake. However here is the making-of video and it really put into perspective for me how detailed sound engineering can get: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jnK1Gq7txYA
Still Beats are much better than 99% of the headphones people use there, especially cheapo in ear models, and most everything the mass market used with their "walkmans" in the 80s and 90s.
I use mainly Sennheiser HD650 for audio work but for listening the soundmagic's are pretty nice. I use them with Comply foams to block out some noise and get a tighter fit/better bass
If I'm planning on actively listening to music or doing production work, I use my nice speakers or a pair of monitoring headphones. But that's a much less common scenario for me.
It's fine if you want to buy them for the looks, but know that you are not getting the best sound quality achievable for said money.
That's actually far truer than you might think: http://gizmodo.com/5981823/beat-by-dre-the-inside-story-of-h...
If I want to know how a piano sounds, I'm going to listen to an actual piano. If my recorded and played backed piano sounds any different than that, it's not 'how a piano sounds like'.
Apart from that and having owned HD600s, ATH-M40x, E-10s and a pair of AKGs, I'm in agreement with the parent and most of the following posts. Don't buy beats, any of the mentioned headphones here will blow you away for a lot less money.
http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/huma...
[1] https://www.etymotic.com/consumer/earphones.html
http://www.headphone.com/collections/in-ear
I ended up with a pair for home, pair for travel, pair for work, and a pair that go in my laptop case. I gave the other pairs to friends and family.
Headphone preference is just as much a personal preference as it is picking the 'best' ones. Some just aren't comfortable on certain shape/size heads or ears. You might just not like how certain pairs sound.
Conversely, from listening to Beats I've found them to be overly cheap feeling and the sound quality isn't on par with their competition.