I will now tell you my BEATS story:
Once upon a time, there was a boy that got infected by this very rare, and incurable disease called Audiophilia. That boy was me. I was only four when I started playing with Mark Levinsons (that a friend of my dad used to own, some start eh?) Back home I loved listening to Eros Ramazzotti and occasionally Dire Straits on the Acoustic Research 98LS speakers and do my kindergarten business.. you know.. hitting on girls.
Then came a very quiet period in elementary school when I was suddenly hit by the Tiesto and Paul Van Dyk euphoria which naturally lasted about 3-4 days, and I was finally back better than ever. I found out a whole new and untapped source of music which seemed too good to be true! For the first time ever, I heard the solos of Comfortably Numb and Stairway to Heaven, and I was already into Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, CCR and all that Acid Rock and Rock n' roll madness.
I bought a new cartridge for my Thorens turntable and got pretty serious. New JBLs came in, along with 2 McIntosh dudes, which I am still not supposed to touch, but they do sound lovely!! I was already into high school, educating my friends all along the way. It would be seriously selfish to credit this to myself, but I very seriously influenced my best friends, out of which 3 rock bands were formed and they still exist to this day.
It was time to go to College in Switzerland. I came here chasing a dream, and it was the best decision ever, but I had to part with my speakers, which was very harsh. From this point on, I was searching for a more portable cure for my Audiophilia, and came up with headphones.
The darkest hour in my life was when I made the decision to buy the Beats By Dr Dre Studio. To this day, I still don't know why I bought them. I would always diss them when i see people wearing them, especially after hearing them. I was somehow tricked by a person telling me that "with headphones, you don't get better than that Mike" What I know is that when I heard them at home, I was completely outraged. Fortunately, the right driver broke down after a week, and got my money back.
And then... a very unlikely person came to the rescue. A DJ!!! He was telling me that.. "there is this Austrian company called AKG, they make some AUDIOPHILE headphones" OMG!! I immediately bought the K242s after liking them a lot! Of course, I found some other amazing headphone companies, but despite AKG's recent commercialization, they will always remain special to me.
The feeling when I sit in the lobby or the library of my College and put my AKG K242 HDs is awesome. It certainly sticks out of the "flock" of beats headphones. But i do get in a lot of trouble in the library, since they are semi-open and leak a lot.
Fortunately, people do ask a lot of questions and test them to see how much better they are. But it went over the top when I delivered a presentation in Business Communication class titled: Beats By Dr Dre: what are they good for? I thrashed them to the max. Right now, I will show them my new K701s when I go back to college after the break, im sure there will be a lot of explaining to be done. But the phones will speak for themselves i guess.
I like to say that my K242s introduced me to headphone audiophilia, but it was actually the beats.. with their horrible sound.
...and thats the way the cookie crumbles.
