I just ran across this item, in which a techie takes apart a set of Beats headphones -- sometimes called "Beats by Dre" -- and finds that the components used to make the $200 retail for about a tenth of that cost.
The item at the link is actually a follow-up post. When the authors ran the original, they found out via commenters that they had bought counterfeit Beats headphones. The repeat review bought two pair of certifiably genuine equipment and found that the real deal cost about $20, which was $4 more than the fake ones had. In fact, the writer notes, he was able to build a very credible version of the phones using half of the knockoff components.
On the one hand, I guess it's kind of a scandal that Andre "Dr. Dre" Young and Jimmy Iovine's name in the manufacturing represents a literally exponential markup. On the other, I think it's a little more of an indictment that there's a market for two hundred dollar headphones plugged into some personal .mp3 player. The compression rate of most digital audio removes much of the delicacies of sound you'd be supposed to use high-end audio equipment to experience anyway, so it's hard to see what your money buys.
In any event, Mr. Young has proven himself a rather low sort of coward and though he has said positive things acknowledging his wrong actions, for my part anyway items connected to his name need not be purchased.
5 comments:
For some, strange, reason you make the assumption that young people buy music and accompanying, inferior quality headphones, to hear the intricacies and quality of music.
Having been a young person, and now raising two, I can honestly say that at the volume they listen at, intricacies and quality are all a mute point.
And I am sure that sometimes you wish it were indeed mute!
Which is why I can't grasp the idea of $200 headphones: You're going to listen to a mediocre recording at a volume that washes out much of whatever quality is left. Why not do it on a pair of $15 earbuds?
And my earlier life choices put those intricacies out of my range as well, thanks to an evening spent with the Messrs. Ramone some 30 years ago.
Todd: There's also the issue of "signifiers." A pair of expensive but not-great headphones that are popular tells the world that (a) you have money and (b) you know what is popular.
As a person who was a young teen in a time and a place where both a and b mattered A LOT, I can't deny the importance for some people of that kind of conformity. I'm just thankful to be nearly 50 now and have neither of those things really matter any more; any clique that excludes me now for not dressing the right way or having the right stuff is a clique I want no part of.
I WOULD pay $200 for a pair of headphones but they would have to be the noise-cancelling kind.
I'd buy a pair of the noise-cancelers and maybe not even plug them in...
I paid $150 in the 1970s (!) for a set of phones. They were, however, Koss Quadraphones, with true (or sometimes not so true) surround sound and a fiendishly complicated control box.
My current headset (Sennheiser HD 497) dates back to '02 and ran $69 back then.
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