For example. I own Sony MX3s. They have decent sound and great ANC but the use is massively frustrating. Swipe controls don't work, the app sucks, pairing with multiple devices is a nightmare. But I keep them for planes, and use my AirPods pro for everything else.

If these headphones have sound and ANC at least as good as my MX3s, and in addition have the standard Apple package of features (insta-pairing with multiple devices, tightly integrated with iOS and Siri for effortless feature control, best in class microphones for voice calls, etc. etc., plus looking cool) I'll buy them and give the MX3s away in a heartbeat.

(Though... how do they charge? Its not clear anywhere I see...)

Same experience as the other commenters with my XM3s, sound great, battery life is great, USB-C charging is great (AirPods Max use Lightning again, thanks Apple), but the touch controls are really bad, using with multiple devices is annoying (XM4 improves the experience with two devices, but will still suck with more, maybe even worse because god knows how you manage which slot gets unpaired when you pair to a third device).

> AirPods Max come with a soft, slim Smart Case that puts AirPods Max in an ultralow power state that helps to preserve battery charge when not in use.

Let me tell you about power buttons: you hold the button, and then you can keep your battery from dying without having to carry around a special case.

AirPods Max are probably really nice, but have enough stupid Apple things on them that I wouldn't be looking at them unless they were the same price as Sony's.

So now if you've just bought an iPhone 12 and picked up a $40 MagSafe charging cable to go with it, you can go get the Lightning cable back out of the drawer because you're going to need it again for at least the lifespan of these headphones.

With the Qi charging case for previous AirPods (the various earbuds versions) they can charge off the same MagSafe cable as the phone (though without a magnetic connection for now).

Maybe Apple wanted to put a MagSafe pad on one of the ears for these, but couldn't make the magnets work without interfering with audio quality?

At the very least they could have gone USB-C, and then if you had an iPhone 12, AirPods Max, and an Apple Watch, you can charge everything using MagSafe Duo and a USB-C cable, which plugs into either the MagSafe Duo charger (for phone and watch) or directly into the headphones. But no, it's a Lightning port.

Feels weird how the AirPods have Pro and Max as separate totally different products, but in in the iPhone where the "Max" has been used before, "Pro Max" is one product.

The rumored name I heard for these was "AirPods Studio", but probably the right call to not use the word "Studio" in headphones that don't have an audio jack on them.

But I'll take it over AirPods ASDF380C.

If you adjust the volume down prior to connecting, you're changing the speaker volume. When you connect to the headphones, it connects them at the volume you previously had used with the headphones. And when you disconnect, your speakers go back to the level they were at before you connected the headphones.

I've never seen them jump higher than my previously used setting.

I do agree though, the headphones are great, but the UX is clunky and nowhere near what apple could achieve with a fully integrated set of headphones.

source: https://www.apple.com/airpods-max/

Their portable lines — laptops, laptop-sized pro tablet — all use USB-C for charging and peripherals compatibility. Their handheld lines — cell phones, earbuds, headphones, TV remotes — all charge with Lightning.

(The older end of the Beats product lines use Micro USB due to having been an Android ecosystem product prior to Apple's purchase; however, Beats products released this year seem to be Lightning.)

I treat the non-pro iPad as a "handheld" device, and the pro iPad as a "portable" device. There are probably more nuanced words in use at Apple for deciding whether a product gets USB-C or Lightning, but I'm not invested in my choice of words, just in highlighting the distinction between the two categories.

It's still used in new Apple products including all iPhones, non-pro iPads, the Apple TV remote, Magic Mouse, Magic Trackpad, and the charging cases for all AirPods.

    but the use is massively frustrating. Swipe controls 
    don't work, the app sucks, pairing with multiple devices 
    is a nightmare.

But... is software really too hard? If so, how does Apple do it, are they just better engineers than the people who work at Sony? Maybe, but that seems unlikely to account for the difference.

And of course I don't really know, as I'm just a person on the internet, but I have a hunch: I believe Apple can do better because they have so much vertical integration, i.e. real control over much more of the technology stack in their product.

Let's say Sony has some in-house devs, but they hire a team on contract for the app's actual UI. Sony's just going to write the API layer for the UI to talk to. Sony will also make some of the hardware, but they're using a prefab chip and some antenna they bought, and they'll buy some proprietary off-the-shelf firmware for the lowest layer.

But, maybe it turns out the antenna and the chip don't play nicely under some key modes of operation. They can't redesign either of them, because they're just buying those parts. They shop around changes, but it would exceed reasonable costs. Maybe the firmware should be able to compensate here, but it's closed-source, and the company that wrote it shut down and sold their properties to someone else that won't turn any request around in under a year. And then, Sony sells the division that was working on the API, and they end up finishing the job out as a contract. This leaves all the API<->UI planning to contractors talking through an intermediary who still works at Sony. So it goes. And we all end up with another expensive piece of crap that just doesn't work.

But on Apple's side? I bet way more of it is in-house, and what isn't is locked in on deals that make Apple by far the most important customer. If they need a change, they get it. Apple's teams just... write the software that needs to get written! Maybe they physically meet each other. The firmware gets fixed when it's needed. And Apple ends up with a 'luxury product' built atop "hey look, it actually works!"

Is my point that everyone should be like Apple, or SpaceX? It's clear that not every firm can have tight vertical integration. Most have nowhere near the size, power, time, or budget to do this.

So my point is that if software and hardware were open by default, at least we could fix the damn things.

Sony maybe made some decent hardware there. It need not be shackled to some crayola software joke, if only they (and all of us) weren't so darn proud of our intellectual property that we could never dream of allowing someone to take a wrench to it.

Things being closed is so built-in that it's hard to even imagine this: how would we fix the headphone software? We'd probably need (expensive, hard to use) ROM-flashing utility hardware, decompilers, and the ability to load arbitrary code onto Apple devices! Impossible! Well, it's all hard because we want it that way. It's safer, probably.

But it boggles the mind.

I have dealt with SO many (and worked for some) software companies that live by this axiom. Get an MVP to market, who cares if its riddled with bugs and hobbles along with duct-tape and paperclips holding it together. "We're just going to throw it away and rewrite it later". Devs spend all their days fixing little bugs with more band-aids - dreaming of the day when they can re-arch it properly. But the truth is, that day is never coming. Why? Because think of the expense vs the gain. It literally is not worth it to have a better experience. The crappy version is already making money. Customer Service agents are cheap. Achieving Apple-level polish is simply not worth it to most companies. That's why you have Chrysler mini-vans dying after 5 years vs Honda mini-vans lasting 15 years.

This isn’t just apple either. My logitech mouse is paired to my laptop via their dongle, and to my desktop via bluetooth. On the laptop the connection is rock-solid, on the desktop it loses the connection once or twice a day for a few seconds.

I’m convinced the problem is bluetooth itself, not the device makers.

I think lately openness is massively overrated. This stuff is hard to get right, and it takes a lot of high-end hardware and tight collaboration between full-time engineers to do it. Random people working part-time in their garages and collaborating over Github will never do it. It works sort of okay for a few particular types of projects, but fails massively for many others, particularly things involving hardware. Only big corps can manage the budget and coordination required to do it right, and they'll only do it if it's closed, so they know they'll get the revenue from customers who want it done right.

I fully agree that just publishing the spec of a chip does not enable random people working part time in their garages or collaborating over github to do it, but creating software and hardware from the ground up with modifiability in mind would enable that kind of ad hoc work.

Would it solve all problems? Would it fix every bug? No, of course not! I'm not saying that open source is the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything -- I'm saying that a world built out of proprietary, competing, closed-off little gardens at the least guarantees that that which was created sub-standard cannot ever be brought to par.

Let me fix my own damned watch, and I really might.

While in reality, we could pool together some money to buy pizza for a couple of weeks for some experienced embedded developer with some RF knowledge and odds are they'd produce something better. Without pants on.

That is a big part of it. But how did Apple do well enough to vertically integrate? They were not the crazy powerhouse they are now for most of their history.

Another big aspect is culture. Apple chooses not to ship things they don't think are good enough. Put aside that they're not always correct. How many other shops do that? How many places stick to the schedule relentlessly, because shipping is all that matters to them? Convince themselves they'll fix the software problems after release?

A big part, I think, is a combination of knowing when it is 'good enough', combined with the courage, patience and money to keep building until you get there (or spike the project because you missed the market window).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_Woz_Machine

About 2 or 3 years ago I was looking for some wireless headphones who don't suck as much and there's an absurd defect that is shared by too many of them, some of them even on the higher end; the loud beep when the battery is getting low, some even had a recurring beep when the battery still has enough battery to keep listening. It makes some kind of sense with how batteries work, but it just breaks the experience so much you have to wonder why nobody thought of simple ways to avoid this behavior, but then you realize that is quite likely that the product was only tested with full battery and nobody on the team uses it on daily basis.

I'm just speculating, but how much embedded code do you imagine Sony throws away and re-writes for every new headphone release versus how much is retained.

I’m seriously considering getting the Airpods Max if they have good Noise cancellation, sound quality and comfort.

Sound quality is also subjective at a certain level. Not everyone wants flat sound like an audio engineer. I like bassy music and headhphones (which the Beats are known to be).

Now, Beats may still be overpriced since they crossed into fashion, but I'm not a fan of this blanket talk about sound quality like it's always objective.

That's what equalizers are for. The point of your speakers/headphones being as flat as possible isn't because it's the inherently best experience for everyone, it's because it's the most flexible experience. You can take a good set of flat headphone and ram the bass through the roof - it'll still sound great. You can't really do the reverse. You can try to equalize a bass-heavy headphone into something more neutral, but the result is worse overall, and a lot more finicky as a user.

> Then you should buy these neutral sounding headphones, and mess around with software to make them sound bassier

Just like sepia toned prints are objectively worse reproductions of the original picture.

People like the sound they get with these headphones, accurate or not. That isn't a personal failing.

My point is good headphones are neutral and versatile enough that they can do both, just like a good screen can make all sorts of different pictures look good.

It's about versatility and quality in different dimensions, and headphones/speaker that impart too much color to music tend to be very one-dimensional which would limit what you can do with them.

There's also the confounding effects of different volume levels producing wildly different mixes, of people's ears/brains responding to frequency ranges differently, and of different music types revealing shortcomings more than others (as anyone who's flinched at pixelated cymbals can attest). All of which make it seem like a more subjective thing because of the complexity of interacting variables.

Regardless, true audio fidelity is something that can be measured to a fairly detailed extent. The fact is, most speakers at most volume levels aren't great at it, just 'good enough'. It mostly boils down to: how much can you tell the difference? Just like with finding that optimal mp3 encoding rate to avoid those damn pixelated cymbals.

Sound is like food. People like different flavors and that is OK.

Yes, and the truth is that many people seem to enjoy the experience of listening to Beats headphones and enjoy that audio more than the audio from many 'better' headphones.

This is why nobody buys tube amps for their guitars. Everybody just wants flawless clean sound with no breakup.

Being "objectively better" on some metric does not mean that the metric matters at all to the target audience.

Anyone that has tried my headphones that have V shaped sound (flat soundstage gets mixed reactions based on their preference) are blown away by how much better they are than their Beats, and at lower cost.

When people listen to my headphones and feel like they need to re-listen to their entire music collection, because they're hearing parts of the song they never heard before, that's how I know it's not all in my head.

apples != oranges.

subjective sound quality (what I like) is always subjective at any level, and objective sound quality (how well it reproduces an input signal) is always objective at any level.

The M1 Macs really just continue Apple's traditional pricing - the base model & price is fine, but the upgrades that you're almost certainly going to want are ludicrously priced and oh hey all the user-upgradability (or any post-purchase upgrades) was removed would you look at that what a total coincidence.

The first Intel Macbook was easily the best and least frustrating Windows Vista computer you could buy at the time. Plus they came with OSX and a slew of great software out of the box that at the time you'd have to pay hundreds of dollars extra for on a PC.

The Macbook Air (even the crappy first revision) was without competition for its time and stayed that way into the early 2010s while everyone else was pushing Netbooks.

The first Retina MBP in 2012 had almost no competition at release with a comparable screen at the same price point.

The first 5K iMac was literally a free computer bundled with the 5k display panel.

The current Mac Pro and the pre-trashcan Mac Pro are/were price-to-performance comparable to other workstation class hardware packages from Dell and HP (they offer less configurations and update less frequently however).

The iPhone SE models are competitive.

The base model iPad typically stands without competition, you either get frustrating garbage on the low end or lower value Galaxy Tabs or ChromeOS or low end Surface tablets (or worse, an ARM based Surface tablet) on the higher end.

The Apple Pencil's price to performance ratio drove down the cost of that entire product segment by popularizing it. Previous $100 stylus options were much worse.

AirPods at their time of release were some of the cheapest completely wireless headphones available (most had behind-the-head wires still).

The new M1 model computers are also now very competitive for the performance they're showing.

Apple basically never competes in a race to the bottom and they rarely offer anything in the lowest tier of product pricing categories and they absolutely don't cater to everyone (especially PC gamers) but for the mid to high end they wouldn't exist if they weren't competitive.

If you consider security updates as a measure of longevity, that’s true for basically every single iPhone. Android are a 2-year device at most if you care about security (and are not a hacker), Apple is a 5-year decice; per usable year, Apple can be much cheaper.

And if you consider resale value, Macs have always been cheaper than competitors. A comparably performing dell was always slightly cheaper, but if you sold it 2-4 years later, the Mac came out ahead. And with the M1, it seems Dell doesn’t even have a sticker price advantage - unless you specifically need Windows, Linux or a configuration Apple doesn’t sell (like 64GB ram in a laptop), Mac seems to be cheaper.

Apple are definitely leading the industry here, but my Samsung S7 (released Feb 2016) got a security update last month (even though Samsung has officially said it's unsupported now).

But do note that S7 wasn’t much cheaper (if at all) than the comparable iPhone when it came out; and this length of support is unusual for Android.

On the other hand, my 5-year old iPhone 6S got the whole new iOS14 update, and my wife’s 6 year old iPhone 6 seems to still be getting critical security updates occasionally, even though the latest OS that supports it is iOS 12, which was replaced over a year ago.

Sure, they are never interested in the bottom of the consumer market, but that doesn't make them overpriced for what they are; they tend to be competitive with actual competitor units.

This is leaving aside the relative merits of the electronics, audio quality and featureset, where they also fail to deliver for the $.

I'll never understand what led Apple to align itself w this overpriced junk.

Apple's products don't break down by themselves but Beats do. My pair had the faux lather completely peeled off, the retracting mechanism on the one side lost its tik and I have aluminium foil stiffed inside the cable jack so I can listen in stereo.

They came as a promotion when I bought my Macbook few years back, which still functions flawlessly.

Except the cables, which are terrible. I have two broken charger cables for a MacBook and a MacBook Pro, a thunderbolt cable from an Apple Thunderbolt Display, a Mac Pro power cord, an iPad charger cable and a couple of old wired earphones. All broken where the cables bend.

I don't think Apple bought Beats for the headphones, really. They bought them for the recently-launched Beats Music streaming service, which is what became Apple Music, and the added music industry connections that came along with Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre.

(It's also my impression that Beats products released after the Apple acquisition have been getting somewhat better reviews in terms of sound quality, but it's not a brand I really keep track of, so that could be wrong!)

wow really?

One of the weirdest myths around audio is that it's possible to objectively rate specific speakers/headphones/etc - while there's no such objective rating for music, which is _the thing that you are playing_ on said headphones! I've listened to a number of very high end setups, and frankly for a lot of music (most pop, for example) you're better off with a pair of AirPods. Yes, with the $2000 setup you hear all the details, but did anyone ever ask if you wanted all those details? And while bass with more "oomph" might not be the most accurate, it often makes the music more fun to listen to.

In my opinion, the entire debate around audio has been focusing on completely the wrong thing: some sort of objective measure of "quality", as if it's some measure you can put a number on and simply compare A to B. Many of my favorite songs, in my experience, lose their power and emotion when listened to on an "audiophile" setup. Sometimes you don't need the details: maybe a bit of distortion and bass is a good thing. And that's just talking about the sound! Getting into the actual experience, there are a ton of non-audiophile products that provide a far superior experience. The actual sound quality of some beat-up 70s rock records and an old turntable isn't great, but the experience is lovely. And the user experience of AirPods + an Apple device is wonderful. Meanwhile the user experience of audiophile products is often (not always, but often) terrible. I've tried a couple of those portable hi-fi players and they are incredibly frustrating. And I love my Etymotics earbuds, but they have to be inserted so deep into the ear that they freak out your average Joe that tries them.

That is to say: I feel the whole audio world should stop with the obsession of some weird measure of accurate, "high quality" sound over everything else. Imagine if other things had the same obsession - people looking at art based solely on some weird measure of "picture quality" and "crispness", or buying extremely expensive, ugly, uncomfortable cars because some Internet reviewer made some graphs showing they had better "drive quality".

A bit of distortion somehow helps?

Well - sometimes it does. And sometimes it doesn't. But if I'm paying >$500 for headphones I want something that is going to have low distortion, high accuracy, and musicality.

These products exist, and some of them are legendary. (Example: Nakamichi cassette decks which combined state of the art mechanical and electronic engineering with a world-leading sound.)

These headphones are very unlikely to be in that league. They're really for brand junkies who want to be seen on Instagram wearing Those Really Expensive Apple Headphones™.

I doubt most buyers are going to care about how they sound, or whether music sounds "more musical" on them.

Regardless of whatever you'd like to call it, I would argue that most audiophile products do not have it. I've personally tried a ton of "audiophile" products, from your standard Massdrop DAC+IEM combo to the incredibly fancy setup of a Swiss acquaintance and was left disappointed. Sure, there's plenty of music that did sound good to me on those setups, but there was more music that sounded better on a pair of AirPods. This is also borne out by my own personal experiments. Let a random Joe listen to your expensive setup with a carefully chosen song, and they'll likely be impressed at first. Wow, the details! The range! Incredible! But let them put on their favorite song, and they'll often actually prefer it on their shitty setup. Try it - the results will surprise you.

And my critique of audiophile equipment is not coming from an untrained ear, or someone who cares about branding. I've been playing violin for almost my entire life, and even plenty of classical music sounds better on AirPods vs many audiophile setups! And as much as I like my Etymotics+DAC combo, it exposes flaws in the music. You hear the sneezes in the orchestra, you notice the small mistakes, and God help you if you play a recording of lower quality - it'll sound terrible. There is an enormous amount of music that is _only_ available in low quality, and it will sound a million times worse on your audiophile setup than your AirPods.

In my opinion, the audiophile world has completely lost its mind. Nobody cares about if the music is actually fun to listen to - they're far more concerned with frequency response curves, which, as anyone in the audiophile world knows, absolutely makes or breaks a manufacturer. Case in point: all the audiophiles downvoting the comment by 'gambiting' to oblivion, simply because they expressed their personal preference! It's preposterous to actually _like_ Beats: clearly that user is just an uninformed sheeple, downvote them and move on. I am so tired of the idea that Beats is objectively bad and Massdrop DAC+IEMs is objectively good. Has anyone ever considered that, just like the music you play with them, it's possible to have personal preferences in headphones?

But $550? Even this high-income Apple fanboi has his limits. At that price, the reviews better say the sound is outstanding. Because for one, Apple is competing against the Beats I already own.

The Momentum Wireless are pretty nice headphones!

https://en-us.sennheiser.com/momentumwireless

Like, think about it this way. Few years ago if I told any of my friends that I have a £200 pair of earphones, they would genuienly think I was crazy. Now, they all have a pair of AirPods, and no one thinks it's crazy. You know why? Because not a single one of them was in the market for a £200 pair of earphones - but they all(as apple users) were in the market for a new apple gadget. Same reason why people who would never consider spending £400 on a watch, happily bought an apple watch. There's just no comparison, no one buying an apple watch considers a £400 mechanical watch instead - it's just not competition.

So yeah, in my humble opinion - people aren't going to be comparing £500 Sennheisers or anything else to them - they will just wonder if they can justify it as a new apple gadget or not. It will be sold to people who would never otherwise in a million years consider £500 headphones.

You fall exactly for the trap the parent is talking about. "$50 earphones" and "$200 earphones" is meaningless. There are many reasons why earphones can be more or less expensive, many of which have nothing to do with audio quality. Things like wireless support, quality of the materials used and whatever brand is embossed on it. My $50 "studio" AKG 240 are probably as good as many $200 earphones, but they're all plastic and not wireless.

https://www.kenrockwell.com/audio/sennheiser/hd-650.htm

[edit]

Think for a moment about what is possible in a device as large as the Airpods Max. It could fit the guts of an Apple Watch, which can already stream audio via cell modem without a host computer (as long as you are using the Apple services).

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204691

In ear headphones have evolved beyond plastic cones for a long time. At that price, you're competing against the very best balanced armature drivers, which basically have perfect frequency responses and harmonics, as well as against planar magnetic and the very best dynamic drivers too.

As for computing audio, yeah that's simply useless. Just have the DSP at the device. The device, iPhone, or Mac, or a PC, or whatever, is aware of which headphones it is connected to, and can trivially run the correction routines itself. In fact, this is already done by many.

In ear headphones aren't going to have enough battery to power a cellular modem.

Sure there is. If the cost of computation for a required sound quality is lower than the difference in driver cost, then computation will win, especially when it adds additional value unavailable to the non-computational approach. Positioning the computation at the device is advantageous since it allows for a simpler data interface. For example, adjustments to the soundstage based on head movement can be performed on-device instead of making a round trip to source for the adjustment.

In ear headphones aren't going to have enough battery to power a cellular modem.

Sure, and when the first iPod was released it lacked wireless networking and was storage constrained compared to comparably priced products. I can appreciate the pragmatism and be appreciate folks working towards an exciting future.

Pardon me for departing, my kid wants to watch the SN8 livestream together; hope you enjoy some high quality Soyuz laserdisks.

https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/Apple-releases-i...

For things like on ear sound stage correction, sure. That can be done. You will pay a heavy cost in sound quality, but it can be done. If your goal is sound quality, you're not going to be doing anything more that is very latency sensitive than ANC.

As for the last point, have fun with your sound streaming device that has 3 bit/s of UI bandwidth and a battery life of 1/5th that it would otherwise. It's not an issue you can fix by trying to fix it in that use case, it's an issue you fix by improving human interfaces, battery technology, and cellular technology, which is already being done. When that will be good enough for what you're describing, we can talk.

As for me, I'll enjoy having headphones with high quality and essentially unlimited battery life, and use the carefully optimized interfaces and computational power of my phone and computer to listen to music.

This is the reason modern active bookshelf speakers like the Klipsch The Fives punch way above their weight and pull off stuff its hardware shouldn’t be capable of.

Apple can do the same thing, they have the engineers and know-how. And on top of that, the positional audio is something that requires compute power anyway.

Also, DACs today are pretty much transparent.

For example, for positional audio and driver/amp compensation, people already do the same as Klipsch does in software on their computer. You just need a good enough microphone and then you can do it by your own using REW and EqualizerAPO, for example.

In any case, I run processing on my computer to apply a convolution filter on my audio stack with adds around 2.3ms of latency and uses 0.15% of my CPU. Compared to the ~200ms of Bluetooth latency it's completely unnoticeable, and I'm sure Apple can figure this out better than I can.

In any case, the transformations are not generic at all. You basically need to do one convolution, that's it. The headphones can provide the impulse response with which to convolve at pairing.

For things from Apple, of course, this is trivial.

Remember, some of those devices have 20mA of battery. The codecs already have to be made easy to decode.

There is also absolutely no need to limiting processing to a static convolution with an impulse response. That's just the only device-specific processing you have to do. Headphones are minimum phase devices, so except for things like distortion, they can basically be described by their single impulse response.

For the rest, like spatial audio, or EQ, or anything of the sort, there is no need to do it per headphone, it's the same for all of them.

Because there aren't any "natural" / "neutral" / whatever speakers / headphones / cochlear implants. They all get a signal and a task: make this sound the way the listener wants.

"Just make it sound as it did when it was (live) recorded"? That's not going to happen even assuming some "perfect" speakers (not headphones), unless you can also supply the room, audience, humidity, and appropriate level of inebriation.

Apple has done a lot of of work on adjusting AirPods to your head and ear, IIRC. That's all software, and exactly the sort of thing they've been good at, even in the last few years.

It's basically iPhone camera vs. Canon & Nikon, the sequel. How many times did people on HN insist phone cameras will never be as good as SLRs, because the latter have the five pound of glass it takes to create good photos?

Turns out software and sensors are a pretty good substitute. While some features of good lenses are still not quite there (bokeh), they've eviscerated them in other, arguably more important disciplines (low light).

Hearing loss is a weird beast that takes many forms. If he truly cannot tell the difference between Beats and his setup in a blind hearing test then maybe I would agree. Do you know if he's done this?

I think you're taking about audio pre-processing stuff that Spotify or others do to qualitatively ""enhance"" audio for their lowest common denominator listeners, which is completely independent from what's being discussed.

Whom amongst us has not been told that this fancy power cable will be the second coming of Christ?

Mainsteam taste is what sells products. Obviously you're not part of the target market and should probably just move on.

I've done A/B testing with decent headphones (http://abx.digitalfeed.net/list.html) and not been able to tell the difference. Maybe you can, but I'd bet that most people can't, and in any case the result is far from butchery.

A lot of people love to fret about this stuff and convince themselves they can tell for the exact same reasons uninformed people go out and buy $200 cables.

It's also the same as people who install Gentoo so they can tune their CFLAGS to be 0.0000001% faster under certain workloads at the cost of not running on any other machine and crashing inexplicably on occasion.

We all love optimizing things, regardless of the actual real-world benefits.

I've mostly noticed differences in lower frequencies seeming attenuated in electronic bass music, though it is possible that this might be due to mastering (for stream vs CD) or normalization

Of course they will. But it's not fair to compare open backs with closed backs without a huge asterisk [0]

> If you want the best sound quality for the buck, you usually need to go with open-backed (or simply “open”) headphones. The open (but uncomfortable) SR60 is probably the best value in the business, followed by the awesome DT-880, which is far better than everything in this review in both comfort and sound quality. But open headphones are like screen doors: they let all exterior noise in, and more importantly, they let all of your music out. This will annoy anyone around you, so it’s extremely inconsiderate to use open headphones in buses, trains, airplanes, shared offices, or anywhere else near other people, and it’s irresponsible to recommend them without this huge warning.

[0] https://marco.org/headphones-closed-portable

The $450 I paid for my endgame headphone/amp/DAC wouldn't even get you in the door of an audiophile speaker place.

I think the main reasons were being able to experience the sub frequencies with my entire body (they're too big to fit in your ears!), and share the experience with my friends.

It's hard and expensive to move a lot of air precisely, and speakers are influenced by room acoustics. $5 headphones beat $50 speakers. $80 headphones beat $200 speakers. And $200 headphones beat $400 speakers.

I can't afford to find out beyond that, but I suspect things get more nuanced on the ultra-high-end.

For me, for music, I'm happy with something like a Sony MDRV6 studio monitor, which sells for under $100. I don't know of speakers I like under $200.

Headphones are also nice for teleconferencing, where speakers aren't.

I say this as someone with both Sony MDRV6 headphones and a home borderline audiophile stereo setup retailing for over $3k.

TBF I was powering the headphones with just my Pixel 3, but it's not a particularly hard to drive headphone.

There's been quite a bit of advancement recently with bluetooth speakers, and we'll probably see some more disruption in the affordable hi-fi space soon with what Purifi is doing with Class D amps.

The headphones will give a more faithful reproduction of the original recording.

Making a nearly-perfect class D amp isn't hard (which is not to say a lot of people haven't messed it up; there are a lot of pretty bad amps out there).

The hard part is the speaker itself. The mechanicals of moving a lot of air accurately are hard. You need a physically large woofer which moves over a long distance. If you do that, your woofer and tweater won't be in the same place, so your phase response will be wonky. You don't want the air cavity acting as a spring overpowering your driver, so you need a large box. Etc. By the end of it, it's super-complex. Headphones are super-easy in comparison.

Secondly, you arguably get more bang for your buck. For a budget of say $300-400 split between open headphones and a DAC you'll get much better sound quality than similar money spent on speakers and an amp. Finally to get the most out of speakers you need space to set them up correctly and a room with decent acoustics. Headphones avoid all of that.

But you can certainly wear them in your cubicle or home office without any issues for other people around you.

Especially if you work from home and have an office that is a room on its own (i.e. garage or basement) open-back are a no brainer for me.

And also open backs just bleed noise, they don't shake the room, so unless someone is next to you they aren't gonna hear anything anyways.

I put together a ~$3k system recently that has blown away any headphone experience I've had [0] [1] [2].

I guess for me, the experience goes beyond just what the music sounds like. Being able to dance without having to worry about anything falling off of my head or out of my ears, and being able to share the experience with my girlfriend and others effectively multiplies the joy I get by an order of magnitude.

[0] https://www.minidsp.com/products/streaming-hd-series/shd

[1] https://vtvamplifier.com/product/vtv-amplifier-stereo-purifi...

[2] https://www.parts-express.com/solstice-mltl-reference-tower-...

Edit: For their dollar that is. With unlimited money I would probably take speakers.

With headphones, I can still hear my music at a loud volume with high quality while the noise outside of my home office is none. The only time someone would be affected would be if they walked into my home office.

If I set my speakers to the same volume level, it'll disturb most nearby rooms in the house.

That being said, I still use AirPods Pro a lot more than both HD800 and HD650 due to convenience of using it even though the sound quality is way worse. Fidelity isn't really much of a concern when I'm doing something else with background music.

I'm very excited about AirPods Max.

Dual actuators mounted like that could be interesting for spatial audio and may also be used to overcome some of the challenges with suspending rigid driver cones.

In other words it should be interesting to see the reviews...

Beats by Dre sell incredibly well in large part because they are a fashion statement. They also have cranked bass, which aggravates people who want accurate response but sounds great to people who put them on in a shop and hear "wow, this one sounds different".

Apple products have long been sold as fashion and status symbols alongside their tech specs. Then they add the ease of integration into their ecosystem. Is that really the same as being "outperformed"?

I'm never going to come to grips with the concept of $500 headphones. It just seems insane.

I don't try headphones any more.

Agree $500 is a punchy headphone purchase though!

(That said, an HD 598 or whatever replaced it in Sennheiser's line is a great intro - the quality of reproduction is very much in the same ballpark, and you don't need specialized equipment to drive it. Considerably cheaper, too.)

So essentially you buy a headphone for ever.

Some examples are Beyerdynamic custom, ATH-50, sennheiser 599, hd-25 etc

The Apple one is technically a lot more complex with a good bluetooth chip (especially compared to the rest of the bluetooth offerings), some digital signal processing to make the 'simple' speakers sound better, a battery (+charging circuit) for 20 hours of wireless playback and a gyroscope to adjust the sound stage to your movement (and gives a decent Atmosphere representation).

I presume a big part of the price of these high-tech cans is contributed by research and software development, not by materials...

No there isn't. The audiophile culture could be replaced with a form where you type how much money you have and it gives you the equipment that you are supposed to buy but this is not because of the costs but because the industry taught the market that it must be that way. Often, the difference of sound quality between high end and low end headphones comes from tiny bit of foam.

It's really about branding and market segmentation.

If you're not hearing the difference between 200$ headphones and 50$ ones or even 500$ vs 200$ and think it's foam then there's something wrong with your hearing. Like the parent said the differences get more subtle as you go up the range and at some point it becomes bullshit (gold HDMI cable stuff)

I got to compare many different headphones from different manufacturers back-to-back, using my own music that I was familiar with.

Under $200 = garbage.

$200 - $500 = generally good and largely indistinguishable apart from the comfort of the headband and the padding.

I was about to buy a pair of HD600 headphones when for a lark I decided to try the "out of my budget" HD800 headphones. They were $1,500 at the time.

It was like night & day. I couldn't believe it. All other headphones rendered the sound of a double bass in a classical piece as a monotonal "thrum-thrum-thrum". With the HD800 it was like you were standing next to the thing. Every note, even the lowest, clearly distinct. You could hear the scrape of the bow across the strings. In orchestral pieces you could hear every intake of breath and every ruffled page.

Head drooping in defeat, I handed over my credit card and bought it right there. I was ruined. There is no going back.

I ended up re-listening to my entire music collection and re-watching every movie that had decent sound mastering. Some songs made the hair stand up on my arms, they gave me a sense of tingly pleasure they never had before.

Totally worth it, at least for me.

But everything is objectively better and the experience is better in 95% of the cases.

Likewise for music. When I listen to some music on my studio headphones I get precise sound and more detail, but in the end some music sounds worse than on cheap but loud bass heavy headphones.

But 10x better? If you want to spend that extra $450 and can afford it then fine but that kind of price gradient sticks in my gullet.

My 105mm macro and flash kit cost about a grand, and let me take pictures of hunting wasps from six inches away - something I couldn't do without them. Likewise, the headphones I use let me hear things I otherwise wouldn't. You can get stupid with money for sure in this space, but that doesn't make everything in this space stupid.

>There's an exponential curve of cost vs quality

    $100 Sennheiser HD 280 pros. A $400 Sennheiser 650 
    will no doubt blow them away

https://reference-audio-analyzer.pro/en/report/hp/sennheiser...

https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/s...

A +6dB hump at 5khz, followed by a (checks notes) -12dB (!!!) dip between there and 10khz.

You may enjoy that sound, but it is (in a literal sense) not high fidelity. Above 4khz those Sennheisers do random things to the frequency response that an individual may or may not find enjoyable. And above 7khz it starts to become a simulation of high frequency hearing loss. I would probably enjoy it, because my old ears aren't great in the treble region.

More to the point, we're comparing active DSP EQ'd headphones (the Apples) to a bunch of passive models. Physical construction of the drivers becomes less relevant when you can use onboard EQ to bend the frequency response however you like, and you don't have to worry about making your headphones' impedance curve work with a ridiculous array of amplifiers because it is mated to a known onboard amplifier.

Now, I'm not claiming that the AirPods Max will be headphones to buy. I really don't like the sound of Bluetooth headphones in general, with the caveat that I haven't heard Sony's near-lossless LDAP codec. But these seem like a reasonable value proposition if you want wireless and a bunch of Apple-specific convenience features and you're in the market to drop a few hundred on some headphones that you might use for several thousand hours.

A linear plot has no bend.

As long as my y axis is linear, I can always see a bend in the exponential curve no matter what scale I use on the left, provided you have the correct x axis limits to visualize the bend.

As far as only paying attention to quality that we personally value and is affordable, I agree.

How is this apparent by looking at the stock photos of the assembled product?

What factors make a better cone?

But just the word "plastic" doesn't really give any useful information. With all of the different formulations of plastics out there, the physical properties span an extremely wide range.

Source: I work in the polymers/materials industry.

You need some material which is rigid enough to push the sound waves in the air, but light enough it can be pushed to high frequencies. If plastic works, why not?