We Took Apart Some Beats Headphones

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ben-einstein/we-took-apart-some-beats-headphones_b_7639618.html

by franzb • 11 years ago

68 54 11 years ago

javajosh• 11 years ago

Cool. I'd be curious to see the same treatment of other high-end headphones. And all Bose products, which have always seemed egregiously overpriced to me.

Tangentially, it's actually really hard to find good headphone reviews anymore, let alone headphone demo places. Pro music stores (like Guitar Center, Sam Ash, etc) are probably the best bet these days - but they tend not to carry headphones like the high-end Sennheisers that used to be my favorites (HD570 I think?).

amelius• 11 years ago

I'm also curious about the price of "high-end" amplifiers. Amplification of electrical signals was solved a long time ago, even before the first home computer was available, and we've not seen a corresponding, dramatic price drop.

mrob• 11 years ago

Audio amplification was "solved" a long time ago only if you didn't care about energy efficiency. Good class-D amplifiers are more recent, and they give real improvements in battery life over older designs.

_asummers2• 11 years ago

http://www.head-fi.org has always served me pretty well for audio reviews. I don't often dip into this market, so this might have changed in recent years.

jseliger• 11 years ago

And all Bose products, which have always seemed egregiously overpriced to me.

AFAICT, their noise cancelling headphones still have by far the best noise cancelling. If you work in a noisy environment or fly frequently, they're amazing. If your primary concern is audio quality in a normal or quietish environment, buy cheaper headphones (or I suppose more stylish ones, if that's your jones).

I actually just got a pair of very expensive Jabra Evolve 80 headphones (http://www.jabra.com/Products/PC_Headsets/Jabra_EVOLVE__Seri...) primarily for their mic. The noise cancelling is dramatically worse than Bose and the headphones make me look dramatically stupider because of the mic. But clients can hear me better so that's a net win.

SyneRyder• 11 years ago

Love my QC25s, they're one of my favorite tech purchases ever. I prefer the sound to my Etymotics and AKG K270S. Can't believe I put off buying them for so long, I wear them everywhere, even working at home at midnight.

I wonder if Bose is doing something beyond noise-cancellation in the QC25s when you turn them on. It sounds similar to a BBE Sonic Maximizer, as if they've licensed the algorithm and tweaked it to the characteristics of the drivers in the QC25s (which sound lousy when the headphones are turned off).

rorykoehler• 11 years ago

Bose sound quality is shocking. A pair of €300 Bose headphones sounded worse than a pair of €20 Sennheisers to me. This is not an exaggeration.

slashink• 11 years ago

Sennheisers are great but i swear by Beyerdynamic. I have a pair of DT-770's that lasted me for 9 years.

You bring up an interesting point that there's no real center in the U.S. that carries audio gear online, Europe has Thomann (thomann.de) that basically carries everything but now in SF it's hard to find something else then B&H Photo Video NY to deliver stuff.

ksk2• 11 years ago

Well, they just evaluated the BOM. That tells us nothing about the sound quality, just the margin.

I'd say the audiophile market is a more resilient to style than the general population, but not completely. Flat response headphones, like the AKG-701's are reviewed as not being "fun". The thing is, audio mixing plays a much larger part in your experience than headphones. After owning the 701's, I would much rather choose different cheaper 'colored' headphones for different genres, than use a headphone that is able to reproduce sounds more accurately. YMMV.

Kenji• 11 years ago

Why would anyone make headphones, of all things, heavier to make them feel high-quality? Comfort (wearing them for hours) is one of my highest priorities and every gram shaved off the headphones adds to comfort. The fact that they estimate the material cost of a 199$ product to 17$ is the icing on the cake, haha. Now I will look down on people who wear these even more.

hung• 11 years ago

Maybe because when a product "seems" too light, people actually complain about it. Beats is all about perceived value vs actual quality anyway.

Remember when the iPhone 5 was deemed too light?

http://gizmodo.com/5945662/the-weirdest-thing-people-hate-ab...

MCRed• 11 years ago

How much does the BOM cost for your headphones? May well be yours (in the $100-$200 price range) cost the same to make.

thoughtsimple3• 11 years ago

I was taught that 5.5x was the standard BOM to retail price ratio. If the revised article is correct and the BOM is $20.19 then there is a fairly large markup to $199.

Udo_Schmitz• 11 years ago

They don’t. To quote Marco Arment: "Those metal parts are the hinges, subject to the most wear, that need to be most durable." See also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-CkZ71iz68

thoughtsimple3• 11 years ago

And one the main differences between the original teardown with the counterfeit headphones was that the hinges were zinc alloy and with the real Beats headphones, the hinges were made with higher quality stainless steel.

whoopdedo2• 11 years ago

That would be reasonable if the entire hinge were metal, but only the visible portion is metal where internally it is mounted in plastic. It's only as strong as the weakest link and that bit of plastic holding the metal half of the hinge looks very weak to me.

The zinc alloy in the knock-offs is weaker than stainless steel. But still much more durable than the plastic its hooked to. In either one the upper part of the hinge will break before the lower.

I don't think the metal is there to add weight, however. Seems to me to be so it looks shiny and has the appearance of being more substantial than it is. (Thus stainless steel which doesn't tarnish readily.) I think it does make a difference having metal on the shell of the ear cups because that's where your fingers touch. Over time painted plastic will fade and show smudges. The metal covering can be wiped clean and maintain its appearance longer. But everything else is plastic and will fade so a pyrrhic victory.

thoughtsimple3• 11 years ago

The original article on Medium that this article on huffington post reprints was based on a pair of counterfeit Beats headphones. The followup on Medium does the teardown on a real pair of Beats. Not much difference but some improved quality:

https://medium.com/bolt-blog/how-it-s-made-series-yup-our-be...

gyc• 11 years ago

Overall the genuine & counterfeit Beats are nearly identical.

But the article did not include any comparison of the audio quality of the counterfeit and genuine Beats headphones, so how could the article come to such a conclusion?

comrade1• 11 years ago

I wouldn't be surprised if the counterfeit headphones sounded better. That's how bad beats is.

dimino• 11 years ago

Post should be updated to link to this instead of huff po.

ripitrust• 11 years ago

people are buying what they want and obviously those guys buying Beats are not looking for very high quality sound. They are buying for style and recognition. The same stuff that Apple has played on us all these years.

Although this article is indeed a high quality analysis, and the author really done a great job. There is no point arguing that a Beats is not a genuine headphone. Whatever product it is, there are always people who are looking for quality and people who are looking for style (In some market they are one).

_asummers2• 11 years ago

I think many people (particularly those who have not done any research, moms, grandparents, etc.) associate the Beats brand recognition with perceived quality. "Oh I see those commercials all the time, and I see people wearing them, they must be good!" sort of thing.

slantyyz2• 11 years ago

> They are buying for style and recognition. The same stuff that Apple has played on us all these years.

I'm not a big fan of Apple these days, but Apple products generally do have better than average build quality -as well as- good design and looks.

They are indeed premium priced, but that's a marketing choice. You might be able to nitpick Apple products' value by specs, but I don't think you can really put them in the same bin as Beats (even though Apple now owns Beats) with respect to quality.

discreteevent• 11 years ago

I remember comparing the iPod to a minidisc with the same headphones and the same audio compression rate. The iPod was really poor in comparison.

Artemis2• 11 years ago

There is actually quality and good engineering in Apple products. Beats headphones do not have anything technically new.

ksk2• 11 years ago

What objective criteria do you propose to evaluate build quality?

Spivak• 11 years ago

They are indeed premium priced, but that's a marketing choice.

Isn't this exactly the problem? Apple has good build quality but a terrible quality/price ratio. In a situation where money is no object and pure quality is the only measure then Apple might very well win out depending on how the customer weighs the value of build quality vs. performance.

But Apple would not be the most profitable company in the world if they were only catering to those types of customers. For the average person a minimum of quality and value are the most important metrics, which Apple would not be winning if it weren't for their marketing and brand, especially in the laptop market.

IkmoIkmo• 11 years ago

They are buying for style and recognition.

That's too simplistic. There's actually quite a few people who prefer Beats' audio, none of that really has much to do with audio tech, but rather with equalizers.

i.e. it's not just style or fashion, it's also sound that really matters. There are quite a few 'blind test' videos on youtube where people prefer the Beats headphones to the technically superior ones.

That doesn't mean that when people prefer Beats' audio, that the audio is 'better', it's just 'better to them'. An objective standard of good audio one could argue is audio that sounds 'as it is', which is where Beats fails. Beats doesn't do that, it deforms the audio to make the bass heavier. And so lots of popular music with young people who like bass, sounds better with Beats, than a more natural headphone which recreates sounds much better.

In short, yes Beats is also about audio, and it's not 'better or worse', just like there's taste in food, fashion, style etc, there's also a taste in audio.

That doesn't fully explain Beats' popularity, of course. There are cheap headphones with equalisers that are bass-heavy that aren't as popular, and that can all be explained like you did with differences in style, fashion, recognition etc. But only mentioning this fails to recognise that there are groups of people who genuinely prefer deformed sound and prefer Beats' audio over even more expensive, technically far superior headphones' audio, regardless of style/fashion etc.

slantyyz2• 11 years ago

> That doesn't mean that when people prefer Beats' audio, that the audio is 'better', it's just 'better to them'.

This. It's just like TV sales. A lot of people like those amped up color and contrast settings in big box stores that would make TV-philes gag.

So what?

Tastes are subjective, and judging people by their tastes is more often than not, wasted cognitive effort.

whoopdedo2• 11 years ago

so lots of popular music

This is the problem. I saw someone ask the other day, "What kind of speakers do professional audio engineers use to make master recordings?" And the answer was to buy the lousiest chinese made boombox from Walmart. Pop music mastering is done so it sounds good everywhere, including on the cheapest radios. That's how the loudness wars got started, because the most effective way to make something sound decent on poor speakers is to maximize the loudness.

Rather than pop music either have the people compare something with more range. If they don't like classical music, have them listening to a movie and see if they can clearly hear whispered dialog while not having their ears blown out by an explosion.

gambiting• 11 years ago

I, myself, couldn't care even a tiny bit about the style of Beats. I buy them because I like how they sound - I like heavy bass, and I found Sennheiser headphones in the same price range to be sounding completely flat and boring for my tastes. Tried even super expensive Sony X-Bass headphones but couldn't find anything that would be comfortable. Have both urBeats and Beats Studio headphones and swear by them - I can use both for hours, my ears don't hurt even though I wear glasses(huge problem with most on-ear headphones for me!) and the music is exactly how I like it. The name on the outside could say diddle-doo for all I care.

The problem is, that people assume everyone wants the best possible sound reproduction. Not true. For the same reason why some people actively like and even prefer greasy dominos pizza instead of the "authentic" stuff. That doesn't mean they are wrong - they just follow their tastes. I found the music played by Beats to be exactly to my tastes - if I find something else which hits that spot but for less money - I will buy that next time instead. But I haven't yet.

ExpiredLink• 11 years ago

written by Einstein

jeffreyrogers• 11 years ago

That must have been a lot of pressure growing up :)

vonklaus2• 11 years ago

* Ben Einstein a product designer at BoltVC.

tibbon• 11 years ago

What's interesting to me is that Apple products generally don't have margins anywhere near this large. Apple's products aren't generally built the 'easiest' way possible for fast assembly and such. The optimization/cheapness on these is amazing.

hellbanTHIS• 11 years ago

Tim Cook's Apple loves big margins, he's a bean counter not an idea man. And we know companies run by bean counters always do fantastically well over the long haul.

pkaye• 11 years ago

The gift box costs more than the speakers?

We Took Apart Some Beats Headphones

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