I recently purchased quietcomfort 15 and beats studio for 349.99 Canadian each to test, and now that I started reading up, Im finding that both dont get that great reviews. Mainly Im finding that for the dollar value I can be getting much better headphones. Ive also been told by many to visit this site and Id be shown in the right direction. So thats my budget, and the names that Ive seen popping up are Grado and Sennheiser mainly.
Im a college student, looking for a pair of good headphones to listen to music (keep in mind I dont know the difference between frequency levels and all the technicalities, Im just looking for something that sounds good for the money I pay). I also live in Toronto, so preferrably am looking for something that I can purchase at a store here.
If anyone has any suggestions please let me know, it will be greatly apprecaited
Also the music I listen to is Radiohead, Floyd, and then a lot of solo acoustic performances, and modern rock.
Here are my two cents. Both Bose and the Beats have their place, though some here would say it's round and has a plastic liner. Both cans are comfortable, popular and have very in-your-face bass, which can be a lot of fun compared to some other cans hanging from hooks at your local Walmart or Best Buy. They're pricey, though. To the average consumer, that translates into better sound. They think these two cans are the very best money can buy.
And that's where a lot of headfiers get their nose out of joint. The typical headfier doesn't just want more bass. He or she wants better overall sound. The quantity of the bass isn't enough; the bass also needs to be tight and controlled, not just floppy, sloppy and ringy. In addition, the mids should provide excellent detail. The treble should be crisp without being overly sibilant. The drivers should be fast enough, and quick enough to black, that you hear the sonic black between the notes. With fast enough decay rate, you gain this sense of space. The music becomes three-dimensional, not just boomy.
Spending $300 at Headfi gets you better headphones - if better is defined as having more of those qualities I just wrote about and not just massive amounts of bass. There are cans that will deliver every bit as much bass, but better, for less than either the Bose or the Beats. And while you're getting your bass fix, you'll also get the treble and mids you won't get from those two cans. At HeadFi, $300 is mid-fi. Headphones here typically top out at over a thousand dollars a pair ($1,750 for the Grado PS1000; $1,400 for the Sennheiser HD800; $1,300 for the beyerdynamic T1; $1,800 for the Ultrasone Ed10). There are even headphones that will run you three grand - or ten!
When you bring up Bose and the Beats in your everyday life, you'll get a lot of high-fives from other consumers who think those headphones are the greatest headphones ever made. At HeadFi, where people are super serious about headphones, and where they'll pay a couple of grand for an amp, or a thousand dollars for a cable, Bose and the Beats are a joke. It's like somebody running in here yelping about the McRib ("The McRib is back! The McRib is back!") when the rest of us are eating lamb, filet mignon, prime rib or just great babybacks. To most of us at HeadFi, Bose and the Beats are basically school cafeteria food.
But that doesn't mean you can't have a good time with them. In fact, I think you can tweak both cans to make them sound better. If they weren't so pricey to begin with, I'd take a pair of Bose's best and make them sound decent. I know what I'd do. It wouldn't take more than twenty minutes. They'd be totally different cans and they'd sound terrific. It's not about brand. It's about what you do with the materials. If you could hear a lowly pair of Grado SR60s (used ones at that) but outfitted with silver wire, with the drivers vented and the driver magnet damped, and with Brazilian rosewood shells, you'd go out of your mind. Mind you, the silver cable will cost you what the Grados originally cost, as will the shells. By the time we were done, they might be as expensive as your Bose or Beats, but that's where the similarity would end.
Right now, even as we speak, you could walk into a Walmart, grab a 40mm headphone off a hook, crack it open, damp the back, vent the driver, replace the flimsy cable with 18 awg speaker wire, four-braid it, throw on a $5 connector and woody up the back and come away with headphones that would make your jaw drop.
Bose is selling sound isolation, either through active or passive noise cancellation. To do that, it puts your ear into a bean bag that isolates you from the rest of the world. That's the good news. The bad news is that the internal acoustics of this headphone just flat-out suck. To deliver more bass, Bose muddies up the presentation. It's the sound equivalent of drinking muddy water. In this case, your water may leave you looking like you were drinking something else. Do the math. The Beats are selling you boom-boom-boom-boom-boom. If you want your headphone to sound like a lowrider cruising through the hood, blaring nothing but beat-beat-beat-beat-beat, have at it. To each his/her own. There's nothing wrong with that. Own it. But if you want to hear the subtle and amazing details in your music, drop the Toys R Us audio and grab something off the for-sale forum. You'd be surprised at what you could get, around here, for a couple of hundred dollars.
