So, remember my post about how Beats Studio headphones are actually pretty good, even if they aren't the right fit for a true studio setting, as their name might imply? If not, it's linked above for your perusing.
In any case, while doing my normal YouTube watching routine, I happened upon this video, embedded below, which is I think worth your watching. The hosts of the show take to the streets and do blind and non-blind listening tests with random people.
It would seem as though the hosts expected people to like the Beats when they saw what headphones they were wearing, but dislike them in the blind test.
What they actually found? It turns out that in blind tests, people generally preferred the Beats headphones, while in the non-blind test they preferred the other headphones.
Now, in interest of full disclosure, the alternative headphones used, made by Philips, are not the model of perfect sound accepted by the audiophile community, or anything. They simply offer a relatively flat, studio sound, and are designed for mobile use and fashion. Because of this, they are reasonably similar to the Beats headphones, with the main differences being brand and sound signature.
The hosts want to chalk this up to the noise cancelling of the Beats headphones. While noise cancelling is certainly a factor for the average person, I think there are other factors to account for.
For one thing, the people in the test used their own audio sources, so this creates two different cases in which the Beats headphones would offer the "better" sound.
The first case is the obvious one, which is that the subjects chose to listen to pop or rap music. This isn't a far stretch, being that hip-hop/rap and pop make up nearly all of the modern top 40 music, so there's a statistically high chance that the subjects would be listening to that.
The second case is less obvious, but no less important. The subjects were very unlikely to be in possession of well-recorded lossless files, and were not using a high quality audio interface. They were likely playing lossy .mp3 files or streaming music at low bit-rate. More importantly, they were likely listening to modern music, which is increasingly mixed in compressed resolution, so that even lossless files do not sound "good" on high quality audio interfaces. The sound signature of the Beats headphones actually improves the sound of these low quality files by not pointing out the harshness like a flat, studio headphone does.
A final factor I would consider is the changing sound signature taste in America. Beats joined the subwoofer movement which began in cars (yes, that's right, Beats did not start the bass-head revolution) and brought it into pop culture. Because of this, many people expect more bass out of headphones, and bass is the defining criteria of "good" audio products.
These factors explain why people chose the Beats headphones as sounding better when they were blindfolded, but it doesn't explain why they thought the better headphones were the non-Beats alternative.
The reason behind this is likely that as much as pop culture pushes the Beats brand, pop culture also pushes that Beats sound like garbage. While this may have been true for the first generation Beats Studio headphones, the most recent Beats products have radically different sound signatures, and no longer sound "bad." The problem is, pop culture hasn't caught up with that change, because it's not easy to change the minds of the masses after they've formed an opinion. Beats have been equated with bad sound, and that's not going to be changed easily.
So, with this video in mind, are you willing to give Beats another shot? Do you own a pair of the new Studio or Solo 2 Beats headphones and take a lot of flack and have a hard time convincing people that they actually sound okay? Let me know in the comments.
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