Author Topic: Apple's master plan may have been revealed.  (Read 10056 times)

You are literally kindling the fire. Both graphs look atrocious in comparison to the "prefect wave". Which, by the way, looks pretty square to me. The Studio looks like a mentally handicapped audio child.
exactly

beats suck, end of story

now lets go back to the proper topic (ie bashing apple for making such a poor decision)

now lets go back to the proper topic (ie bashing apple for making such a poor decision)

It's not even a goddamn decision, why is everyone taking the article as truth? There's even a loving question mark at the end of the title, ffs. This is literally the third time I've said this.

Yeah I know, but this hypothetical action would be really damn dumb if it ever happened

and knowing apple this seems like something they actually might try to do, because since they own thunderbolt, they could make a lot of money off of headphone companies this way provided it didn't blow up in their faces
« Last Edit: June 09, 2014, 12:39:57 AM by takato14 »

exactly

beats suck, end of story

now lets go back to the proper topic (ie bashing apple for making such a poor decision)
It's a rumor, probably created by a anti-apple guy, we wont know until the iPhone 6, again, i still doubt this is going to happen.

It's a rumor, probably created by a anti-apple guy, we wont know until the iPhone 6, again, i still doubt this is going to happen.

Again, patents show the 3.5mm jack is still there.

Frequency Response as flat as possible?  Nope, this is why I dislike measurements in the first place, the FR of a headphone is affected by something called HRTF, head related transfer function, which describes how sound reflects off the geometry of the head and ear.  Everyone's head, ear, and inner ear geometry is different, and because of this, everyone hears things differently.  "Flat line" is not a flat line for everyone.  There's no way to account for this in measurements, you just need to listen to a headphone you're interested in and decide for yourself.

Harmonic Distortion doesn't matter?  Are you stuffting me?  THD is very important, if a region has high THD, it will sound thick and heavy, how does that "bear little importance to overall sound quality"?

Isolation, sure, close enough.

Impedance, while it's good to have a flat impedance, the phase is what really matters, and tbh having higher z is usually a good thing, as the output z of the amplifier you're using can interfere with the bass response if the headphone's z is too low.  It's called damping, ideally, you want the output z of the amplifier to be 8x less than the headphone's z.  A lot of amplifers are poorly designed or have lax design, leading to output zs of greater than 1 ohm, tube amps especially, though tube amps in general are a debate for another day and another thread.  When the factor of 8 is exceeded, the headphone's diaphragm starts to lose control in the bass, and as the output z of the amp increases, the effect affects higher and higher frequencies.  I would go into reading the impedance, phase and sensitivity for the sake of choosing an amp that will power the headphones correctly but that's a 10 pager that doesn't belong here.

Square Wave, nothing will ever be square, and in fact, having a moderately strong leading edge and fast recovery is better than looking like a square.  As tak said, after that it should be a smooth line.

I would like to say I put no water in measurements however, as I've experienced, headphone audio in particular is too subjective to be portrayed as graphs and statistics.  I can't get any sort of feel for the differences I hear between headphones with graphs; what I see is not what I'm hearing.  There's a fundamental flaw in measurements too: headphone measurement is a very new thing, there are more than 4 different schools of thought as to how headphone measurements should be taken, what sort of corrections to apply, how to interpret them, etc, and nobody can decide on or agree on anything.  This is a red flag for me, and a big reason why I advocate listening instead of trying to get something meaningful out of graphs.  Also, those graphs look to be Headroom graphs, which were taken on Tyll's old equipment using worse methods, it could stand to be redone with the graphs he's made for InnerFidelity.
« Last Edit: June 09, 2014, 01:14:08 AM by izzyaxel »

Doesn't detract from the fact that Beats sound bad and you should feel bad.

Doesn't detract from the fact that Beats sound bad and you should feel bad.
uh

he loathes beats almost if not just as much as I do lol

i thought it was uncool to try and be cool.
i mean this was how its worked since forever.

but apple/beats kids these days dont grasp that.



regardless of calling people posers. as an electronics aficionado, i like my power - price - aging capability ratio to be perfect.
therefore apple is absolute garbage

Frequency Response as flat as possible?  Nope, this is why I dislike measurements in the first place, the FR of a headphone is affected by something called HRTF, head related transfer function, which describes how sound reflects off the geometry of the head and ear.  Everyone's head, ear, and inner ear geometry is different, and because of this, everyone hears things differently.  "Flat line" is not a flat line for everyone.  There's no way to account for this in measurements, you just need to listen to a headphone you're interested in and decide for yourself.
HTRF can't be predicted. Having a flat line makes it, on average, the closest to the way it was designed to sound for everyone. Having it be a non-flat-line just forgets it up even more.

Harmonic Distortion doesn't matter?  Are you stuffting me?  THD is very important, if a region has high THD, it will sound thick and heavy, how does that "bear little importance to overall sound quality"?
Harmonic Distortion does matter, I agree, but not nearly as much as frequency response. If a harmony is slightly distorted, it'll still sound like a harmony.

Impedance, while it's good to have a flat impedance, the phase is what really matters, and tbh having higher z is usually a good thing, as the output z of the amplifier you're using can interfere with the bass response of the headphones z is too low.  It's called damping, ideally, you want the output z of the amplifier to be 8x less than the headphone's z.  A lot of amplifers are poorly designed or have lax design, leading to output zs of greater than 1 ohm, tube amps especially, though tube amps in general are a debate for another day and another thread.  When the factor of 8 is exceeded, the headphone's diaphragm starts to lose control in the bass, and as the output z of the amp increases, the effect affects higher and higher frequencies.  I would go into reading the impedance, phase and sensitivity for the sake of choosing an amp that will power the headphones correctly but that's a 10 pager that doesn't belong here.
I agree with this, but you're not really supporting dre with this so it's not like I'm conceiting this point.

Square Wave, nothing will ever be square, and in fact, having a moderately strong leading edge and fast recovery is better than looking like a square.  As tak said, after that it should be a smooth line.
It seems like you don't realize why a square wave is supposed to look like a square. If a frequency changes instantly, you shouldn't be able to hear all the frequencies between the two as it changes. It should change instantly, without playing anything in between.

Doesn't detract from the fact that Beats sound bad and you should feel bad.

Wow, that was a total non sequitur; I said nothing about Beats there, none of it was supposed to be about Beats, why did you think any of it was about Beats. :/

For the most part, I'm apathetic about beats.  My hate for them burned out a long time ago, and left a distinct lack of caring in its place.

Edit: why do people think I'm defending Beats?  I'm really not...  Also, the thing about square waves, yes I know why it's supposed to look like a square, however the overshoot, I believe in this standard, is the target, not a perfect square shape.
« Last Edit: June 09, 2014, 01:26:22 AM by izzyaxel »

Edit: why do people think I'm defending Beats?  I'm really not...

You're (possibly unintentionally) arguing that they don't actually sound bad by trying to attack the metrics used to objectively prove they suck.

You're (possibly unintentionally) arguing that they don't actually sound bad by trying to attack the metrics used to objectively prove they suck.

Yes quite unintentionally, the original point was that the person who made that chart had no loving clue what he was talking about re: interpreting measurements.  Beats do measure HORRIBLY by the metric used for those graphs.  But I also stuck in how you really shouldn't be brown townyzing graphs anyway, due to the chaotic nature of that particular science, and the fact that graphs just don't tell you what something sounds like no matter how deeply you interpret them.

Harmonic Distortion does matter, I agree, but not nearly as much as frequency response. If a harmony is slightly distorted, it'll still sound like a harmony.
I would argue that THD is often a lot more important than FR, especially even-order THD

Quote
It seems like you don't realize why a square wave is supposed to look like a square. If a frequency changes instantly, you shouldn't be able to hear all the frequencies between the two as it changes. It should change instantly, without playing anything in between.
you're assuming that what the microphone in the dummy head is recording is exactly what the headphone is outputting and exactly the same thing the person will hear, which is highly idealized

the 300Hz square wave can show you a lot, it slants downwards from treble to bass and can tell you what the performance is at any particular frequency. Typically, a large initial overshoot means you're going to have very sharp definition up top. The angle of the rising edge tells you what the attack time is, the falling edge after that tells you how fast it's decay time is, and the amount of noise and undershoot after that tells you how clean it is.

The 30Hz isn't as useful but it does give you a better idea of the down-low performance. If a headphone shoots up very far (like this) it will push a lot of air and give you a sense of impact. If it doesn't slant back down (like this), it will sound deeper.

(Also I just realized the LCD-2 was probably a better representation of "perfect" square waves than the 009, especially since the 009 is an electrostat, but whatever, my point was to prove that the initial overshoot should not be thought of as a "flaw" if it overshoots a lot because that is an artifact of the driver's excursion, not the response of the transducer.)

But yeah he wasn't defending beats whatsoever, he just went on a little tangent explaining what was wrong about the graphs/image/etc that was linked earlier.
« Last Edit: June 09, 2014, 01:45:03 AM by takato14 »

I would argue that THD is often a lot more important than FR, especially even-order THD
you're assuming that what the microphone in the dummy head is recording is exactly what the headphone is outputting and exactly the same thing the person will hear, which is highly idealized

the 300Hz square wave can show you a lot, it slants downwards from treble to bass and can tell you what the performance is at any particular frequency. Typically, a large initial overshoot means you're going to have very sharp definition up top. The angle of the rising edge tells you what the attack time is, the falling edge after that tells you how fast it's decay time is, and the amount of noise and undershoot after that tells you how clean it is.

The 30Hz isn't as useful but it does give you a better idea of the down-low performance. If a headphone shoots up very far (like this) it will push a lot of air and give you a sense of impact. If it doesn't slant back down (like this), it will sound deeper.

But yeah he wasn't defending beats whatsoever, he just went on a little tangent explaining what was wrong about the graphs/image/etc that was linked earlier.

Why don't we make it even more complicated and add in odd order distortion and intermodulation distortion too :P  Arguably IMD is just as important as THD and OOD.  But I will say even-order is benign, all it does is thicken the sound, while odd order is the real offender; it sours the sound very noticeably, because the frequencies clash with each other.