The Evolution of the Headphone

http://www.ligo.co.uk/evolution-of-headphones/

by jamesbritt • 12 years ago

24 31 12 years ago

ligo.co.uk

zarpwerk3• 12 years ago

Really interesting & the fact they call Beats by Dre a "fashion accessory" is a subtle middle finger :)

hathawayp• 12 years ago

Haha, well it's hardly an evolution in terms of sound quality!

flyinghamster• 12 years ago

Kudos to them for pointing that out, but brickbats to them for such a lousy web site. What is it that turns some web designers into such pretentious twits?

Meanwhile, I'll stick with my DT770 Pros. As unfashionable as they may be, sound trumps fashion (which can also be said for any headphones from Grado).

PeterWhittaker3• 12 years ago

I don't know about that. Headphones is headphones, or at least headphones was headphones. Then Beats "brandified" them, made them cool (cooler), make them shiny.

Some speculate that Apple bought Beats precisely their accessorizationability factor (yeah, yeah, it's early, I'm grasping for neologisms to summarize the concept). Basically, Beats figured out how to cost-effectively profitably mass produce many variations on a common product to increase cool factor and consumer choice.

Given ambient noise, compressed audio, and always-imperfect listening conditions, sound quality is definitely not the first thing most consumers look for (notice I didn't write listen for) in a set of headphones.

(I have decent reference headphones for the house, but elsewhere it just doesn't matter.)

jmount• 12 years ago

Site has a completely unusable user interface.

garethbrown• 12 years ago

What's unusable about it? Scroll down or click the arrows.

frik• 12 years ago

It doesn't work correctly more than half of the time in Firefox and IE 11 (scrolling, clicking, cursor keys). There is also a transparent red area layering above half of the screen (maybe it's intended and fits the "Beats" headphone, the last picture?). The "1990s" are missing too, with the Sony disc man (portable audio CD player), its ear plugs and the later MP3 CD player.

ginko• 12 years ago

Seriously, when will this "scroll for next page" fad be over? This is completely unusable with a scroll-wheel.

zarpwerk3• 12 years ago

Maybe your scroll wheel is worn out - fine for me?

blt• 12 years ago

I get the feeling that many, many, many of these scrolling sites were only tested with two-finger scrolling on an Apple laptop touchpad. They often feel extremely awkward with a regular scroll wheel.

radicaledward2• 12 years ago

I use an Apple trackpad with two-finger scrolling for 70% of my web browsing. I have yet to encounter one of these scrolling sites that didn't feel extremely awkward on it. Maybe the target audience is iPad users? I feel like the behavior might make sense on a tablet.

jpetersonmn• 12 years ago

As I scroll through them, the audio from the first section keeps playing until it's done... so if I scroll down to the 2010's its like it's playing 5 layers of audio and I can't even tell what's going on.

PeterWhittaker3• 12 years ago

What browser? I had no problems, FF 31.0, cookies denied, ABP in place, flashblock running.

Cool presentation.

mpthrapp• 12 years ago

I can only get the text to display if I scroll down and then back up, and I'm not getting any audio. I disabled uBlock and Disconnect.me and I'm not running any noscript-esque extension. Chrome 36 on Windows Vista.

yock• 12 years ago

We can argue all day about the use of scroll for navigation, but that would be sad because this is seriously cool.

georgemcbay• 12 years ago

I'm not sure which part of it was coolest -- the confusing navigation, the poor use of relatively low-res images for a responsive background (they look terrible on a browser-maximized 2560x1440 display), the default-on sound that many pages had (I realize this is about sound, but no webpage should play sound without user interaction [other than just scrolling to the page]), or the fact that it hung/crashed my Chrome tab on the last page.

encoded• 12 years ago

The last page hung my Firefox as well. :(

mikestew• 12 years ago

If by "cool" you mean "little chunks of text separated by a requirement for the user to keep clicking and clicking and clicking...", then yeah, this site is awesome.

That was sarcasm. That site blows, for reasons better outlined by other comments in this topic than my single complaint. I got a couple of clicks in and lost interest.

KhalilK• 12 years ago

Ad Blocker is going nuts 300+ blocked 'ads' and still going.

zarpwerk3• 12 years ago

The site seems to be using Youtube for videos & audio might explain Adblock issues

lordbusiness• 12 years ago

Doesn't work in my browser.

Safari - Version 7.0.6 (9537.78.2) on OS X 10.9.4

peterwwillis• 12 years ago

Why is the entire internet turning into a 21st-century version of Geocities, with every hack web designer coming up with new and innovative ways to piss off users who just want to see some content? Do designers really think users want to be annoyed by some scrolling display? Are they the internet's new sadists, tempting us with interesting content, only to subject us to by badly designed, incompatible, painful interfaces? I still have nightmares about mouseover pop-up boxes. Leave my god damn scroll wheel alone.

ripter• 12 years ago

Site doesn't work. OSX Chrome 36.0.1985.143

tonetheman• 12 years ago

Rocket 88 for the win!

geon• 12 years ago

Low contrast, thin text on top of images? Seriously?

This is completely unreadable.

normloman• 12 years ago

Lame attempt by a cordless phone store to score some google-juice. I first thought this was some 7th grader's history report.

michaelbuddy• 12 years ago

ditto, page sucks. It was probably 10 times the work of a regular site and it's not navigable. Sorry whoever built and paid for it. It's really annoying. Please fix, as the content appears good. maybe I should browse with styles off. Use a normal timeline, isn't there timeline.js or something for this kind of project?

PeterWhittaker3• 12 years ago

I love this presentation, thought it was pretty slick. Unlike a lot of sites for which I must fiddle with my cookie manager, my ad blocker, and my flash blocker, this one worked great right off the bat, and I really like the multimedia presentation.

Nice job.

The Evolution of the Headphone

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