facepalm

Or look cool with your cooler headphones
 

Quote:

Originally Posted by Uncle Erik 

Well, I suppose you could wear them to look cool and have some good IEMs in underneath.

Head-fiers are trend setters. In 6 months the Jecklin Floats are going to ooze sex appeal.

I Wonder if someone will make "after Market Cables" for them?????

Well it is true, headphones are becoming more of a fashion accessory.

And I must say some of them look pretty snazzy, like the various AIAIAI offerings.

Oh man I really loath products that are designed to look like you're not trying to be being fashionable.  The retro/studio looking phones are a perfect example.  The look says "substance over style" and yet they are the opposite.  Like the homemade-looking t-shirts that look silk-screened, or the torn jeans, or buying clothes at the Goodwill (or paying a lot for clothes that look like they came from the Goodwil )  It's hard to look non-fashionable these days!  The companies are quick.

let's get people to walk around in metropolitan areas with lambdas. who's with me.

Quote:

Originally Posted by rhythmdevils 

Oh man I really loath products that are designed to look like you're not trying to be being fashionable.  The retro/studio looking phones are a perfect example.  The look says "substance over style" and yet they are the opposite.  Like the homemade-looking t-shirts that look silk-screened, or the torn jeans, or buying clothes at the Goodwill (or paying a lot for clothes that look like they came from the Goodwil )  It's hard to look non-fashionable these days!  The companies are quick.

The Wikipedia article on hipsters references a source saying that "hipsterism fetishizes the authentic" elements of all of the "fringe movements of the postwar era—beat, hippie, punk, even grunge," and draws on the "cultural stores of every unmelted ethnicity" and "gay style", and "regurgitates it with a winking inauthenticity." I don't think there's ever been a much more apt description.

I recall another advice thread here with a person asking about Skullcandies because he was into the "punk" culture. I naturally had a moment of fear for humanity, but then another member summed it up for me. He said something like "If you want Punk as simply a fashion, go ahead and get the Skullcandies. But if you want punk as a culture, get Grados."

Nice post, I agree that is a very apt description.  Better than I've ever come up with.  I notice a pattern where many movements are born on something new, ideas or ways of doing something new or different.  And those things are real and genuine and it brings people together around them.  But companies actually have scouts and informants to tip them off on these sorts of "genuine" trends, and are quick to capture the image they create and sell it.  Soon people are joining the movement by buying something instead of actually doing something, and the whole thing kind of flip flops onto it's belly and dies.  The same could be said about gentrification I think.  Wacky artist types looking for cheap places to live move out of the city centers and those areas soon gain a rich community because of it, and it isn't long before people want to buy their way in and the rent goes up, and the artists move out, leaving only those wealthy enough to keep living there.  Most of the wacky artists who created the scene can't afford it anymore.  San Francisco comes to mind. 

But back to headphones, it takes a lot of work and discerning taste to find the good ones so I think there will always be the skullcandies and bose for people who just want the idea of good sound, but don't dig much deeper than that.  I bet bose was the first company most of us at head-fi heard about.  I happen to have been given sennheisers and cursed at a young age by my father

Was thinking about this a bit more, and I think in the end, headphones being stylish and trendy right now can only be doing good things for the headphone market, which means more motivation for manufacturers to make not only stylish headphones, but also good sounding headphones for us.  Also, I bet that stylish headphones like Skullcandy are like the gateway drug to head-fi.  The more people who want headphones, the more people who will get interested in more than just the look.  I wonder if the ipod generation and coolness of the headphone look right now has led to the recent onslaught of very high end phones like HD800, T1, LCD2, HE6, Stax flagship, Denons, Ultrasone Editions, pricey grados, and more.  All of those phones have all come in the last few years. There has also been a big surge in good sounding closed portables- the M50, D1001, and SRH840 are all recent, and probably wouldn't have happened without the new headphone sexy craze.

Yes, the more people that come here asking for advice because their Skullcandies broke, the better. Good sound is something that most people can notice, but the vast majority don't care about. The folly of too many uppity head-fiers is that we put down people who come here asking for advice coming from the trendy headphones, and insist that they get an expensive headphone, and then get an amplifier. That kind of snobbery is what turns people off from hi-fi. I remember when I  bought my first pair of headphones, an inexpensive pair of Koss IEMs, that I thought that I was spending quite a bit of money for headphones. To the average consumer, $50 is a heck of a lot to spend on something as frivolous as headphones. I've watched myself go from thinking that $25 was a lot to spend, to spending nearly 100 times that (including music ) and I'm guessing that there are tons of others who have traveled a similar path. Had I been snubbed by some elitist head-fiers in my early research, I could easily have just become frustrated and not bothered to learn anything. Cheap headphones and crappy headphones are what is creating a market for our hobby, as RhythmDevils said, so we really shouldn't be so dismissive of the cheap brands and the noobish consumer.

Quote:

Originally Posted by logwed 

Yes, the more people that come here asking for advice because their Skullcandies broke, the better. Good sound is something that most people can notice, but the vast majority don't care about. The folly of too many uppity head-fiers is that we put down people who come here asking for advice coming from the trendy headphones, and insist that they get an expensive headphone, and then get an amplifier. That kind of snobbery is what turns people off from hi-fi. I remember when I  bought my first pair of headphones, an inexpensive pair of Koss IEMs, that I thought that I was spending quite a bit of money for headphones. To the average consumer, $50 is a heck of a lot to spend on something as frivolous as headphones. I've watched myself go from thinking that $25 was a lot to spend, to spending nearly 100 times that (including music ) and I'm guessing that there are tons of others who have traveled a similar path. Had I been snubbed by some elitist head-fiers in my early research, I could easily have just become frustrated and not bothered to learn anything. Cheap headphones and crappy headphones are what is creating a market for our hobby, as RhythmDevils said, so we really shouldn't be so dismissive of the cheap brands and the noobish consumer.

This works up until there are $500 headphones with style over substance. That said, I agree about the snobbery of Hi-Fi, the amount of Bose bashing and Skullcandy bashing here has gotten ridiculous. Most people couldn't care less, really. The Head-Fiers that feel the need to rub in their supposed superiority at every opportunity are the worst kind.

I think Niel has the right idea...