Beats by dre Pro Indepth review

Hello again, Head-fiers and alike.

This will be the first review and measurement test of the Beats pro with a proper lookout for what makes it thick or thin.

As the Pro was my headphone of choice to bring to the lab for a First test, expect other headphones to get the same treatment later.

Package

They came with a standar beats packaging the day I got them as there are many other reviews and Clips showing of.

A List of things featured to be found of their website includes:

Comfort

A thing to adress is that these are very depeding on the size of the users ear it seems.

Their Circular shape was a pretty bad choice for all around comfort level, as were the increased ear cup foam density too it seems due to the hardness of the earpiece.

If your ears have a tad to large size, the edge of the stiched area in the middle of the cups will put quite abit of pressure against your ear. To boot, the edge itself may also cause some friction in the area due to the headphone not sitting on and being prone to move around.

Design & construction

They are considerably more sturdy than the studios were due to them being more tightly fit into eachothers parts, and having a almost all aluminium construction.

Also the headphone sport a Dual input/output desing wich seems kinda odd due to the fact that chaining together several headphones from one source seems to not look very well on the satisfactory fidelity and sound pressure level in output towards audio preformance.

They also sport no Active noise cancellation nor any built in Class D amplifier that the studios had.

A Rotatable earcup was also added due to them being marketed for pro or Dj applications, although I have to say the feature doesn't work as well as it was seemingly intended to.

Sound measurement and listening

As the most important part of the review the Beats by dre pro was measured and listened to on various equipment.

This is the Tektronix two channel digital phosphor oscilloscope with the beats pro on a Square wave test. (All were done between 50-5000hz)

Same as before but with some damping done to the earcup wich resulted in a little improvement only.

Here is the Sine wave generator that was used for this test.

Here is the microphone used wich was a Omnidirectional Abacus
Arta 80 audio analyser with pressure applied around the earcup due to its working standars.

To start with the frequency respones as opposed to the studios was still quite similar but with a revelation of something not many would like.

Looking at them

Studios courtesy of headroom

Beats pro courtesy of Pcmag as is the graph under with their associated others measured.

(Wonder how the pro became so different between each test and how controlled it was)

Our measurment were somewhat in between the two show by Pcmag.

We started of at 20hz as a reference point wich in comparsion to the test done by headroom would be starting with measurment at 10db+ from their 0 point.

As it was, the headphone were fairly even from 20hz to 160hz were it started to drop by -1,5db. At 320hz that gap was pushed towards the double at -3db. Following that came a downfall by -4.4db at 640hz wich went down to -5,2db at 905hz and culminated at 1280hz with -7.4db. After that it went towards the referenc point of +-0db at 2770hz as of our measurement. After that it dropped down by -6.5db by 3760hz with a reach towards the sky again by -0.92db at 4650hz. Falling again occured at 4960hz by -8.52db and another change at 7240hz made it back towards -6db. At 8000hz it was about -6.47db and 10,24khz revealed the biggest drop yet by -10,7db and after that it went so bad that it became practically dead at 14khz.(Note the 10db difference as mentioned above)

A rollercoaster like that migh be fun to ride but listening to it certainly was not pleasant by any means..

Also by looking at the square wave response in the picture above and compairing it to this

(This and the picture of the oscilloscope is the subject of matter)

This is a more detailed set of accurate measurement made by Tyll hertsen of Innerfidelity.com

Also another much more correct measurement by Tyll on the studios for comparsion.

It was pretty strange how the succeded with making even wider gaps between the not especially fast response for either of them.

Also to note is that monster did not provide any impedance spec for the headphone but it could be safe to say that in relation to headphones like Denon ah-d5000 the beats pro were about 20 ohms with different resistance incorporated.

To sum the things up, listening to the headphone was done also.

Equipments used was a desktop computer with settings as to make the path as clean as possible with associated Focusrite Saffire DAC run through Foobar2k in Asio and a custom built amplifier as well as the Argon HA-1 "class-A" headphone amplifier and a Micromega cd player.(All of these were used in various combiations with some other pieces then and then)

Listening to things like The McIntosh Audio espectacular reference disc 24bit/96khz with tracks like

Antonio Vivaldis Four Seasons Concerto in E Major RV 269 Spring Allegro and Zoltan Kodalys Duo for violin and Cello Op. 7 Allegro Serioso non troppo showed the lack of transparency in a very immideate way that most people would notice no matter if comparing to cheaper,similar priced and high end headphones made by some of the companies that are liked here on head-fi.

For testing out the sheer speed of the transducer I followed up with Aphex twins Bucephalus bouncing ball wich contains very fast transient shifts and many sudden great dynamic changes in it, clearly showed a great lack of speed and a heavy overbearing low end together with a top that were pretty oblivious to any sort of musicality nor exactness.

Other acts with Pianos,Violins,Drums,synthetic bass followed by tracks recorded live and tracks very well listened to I found nothing at all that really could give any hope to this headphone in anyway.

Conclusion

The soundsignature could very well be described as muddy with overbearing low end even more than the studios already had.

After all monster outdid themselves with a product with No class D amplifier Nor noise cancellation and a higher price that fell lower than the already low standar the studios had. Even if the recordings were done in such a way as to have instruments or synthesized to sound more or less at certain frequencys, the beats fell short no matter what I tried.

Hereby for anyone who were having a modicum of hope for monster bigger headphones, I wouldn't give much for looking at them again even though they had made mediocre headphones.