So, we have to define, in your opinion, what would make a pair of headphones shitty.
If you are going to reduce them to the basest level of what the purpose for a speaker or headphone is, to reproduce the input sound, then yes, they are shitty, because they are not good at that.
From a purely objective standpoint, you are going to have to judge them based on that. Why would you want the speakers or headphones to make a different sound than what the signal is?
If you want to move away from an objective measurement of what makes a headphone good or not to something that's purely subjective (i.e. 'I like how they sound'), it's impossible to answer that question.
The Solo2 are a pair of Beats headphones that actually measure really well - they're good at the base purpose of a transducer. But they're $250. You could buy a pair of Sony MDR-7506 that measure similarly (IIRC, a bit better, even) for $85.
>If you are going to reduce them to the basest level of what the purpose for a speaker or headphone is, to reproduce the input sound, then yes, they are shitty, because they are not good at that.
Though I don't personally like the cold, base heavy sound of Beats, I don't really get how you could know this, because most people have no idea what a piece of music should sound like. They know how they think it should sound, they know how they like it to sound, but very few know how it should sound. The only real exception to this is music with "real" instruments like pianos who's sound is familiar to enough people that their reproduction can be reliably determined. Even then, however, unless you know the piece well, it's unlikely most of us are in a good position to make a judgement about the speaker's quality.
So what factors are you using to determine if the sound is reproduces correctly?
This is a pretty scientific matter - when I say "the purpose is to reproduce the input sound", we can tell exactly what is supposed to be reproduced, and we can tell exactly how capable the speaker is of reproducing it.
Some exceptions have to be made due to how having headphones on your head causes the sound to change, but again, these are pretty much known quantities - to get the equivalent of a flat response from a speaker, you will see change X in bass response, change Y in treble response, etc for headphones.
It's not a question of esoteric "The artist and recording engineer meant for this to be played on Kef blades powered by a Cary tube pre-amp feeding into a Mcintosh amp setup using a rail to rail ladder DAC", but a "We know how frequency response should look when measuring equipment and if it doesn't look like that then the sound you are getting out of it is different than the source material"
> This is a pretty scientific matter - when I say "the purpose is to reproduce the input sound", we can tell exactly what is supposed to be reproduced, and we can tell exactly how capable the speaker is of reproducing it.
You are assuming the song was mixed by someone wearing headphones that perfectly reproduce the input sound.
Suppose the person who mixed a song was using beats headphones or other headphones that audiophiles consider inferior but that they know the majority of people use to listen to music. Wouldn't that then mean Beats headphones actually provide the listener with the actual, intended experience?
So, headphone use in studios is not generally for creating the final mix. Monitor speakers are used nearly exclusively in professional studios as what you are mixing for. Headphones have multiple places in the production process where they are used, but they're not the final target.
There's a few reasons for this. The most pragmatic is that doing so will produce the track that sounds the best on the widest variety of setups - EQed or not. There's also not any single headphone out there that is used so predominately that it would make sense to cater to it in specific. The closest might be apple earbuds, but people using those probably aren't too concerned about sound quality anyway, so it doesn't make sense to mix with those in mind either.
From a theoretical standpoint, you're not necessarily wrong, but it's just not how things currently work, and there's not really any reason why it ever would work that way in a professional studio.
I make no claim as to what the people making music exclusively in their bedroom are doing, though.
Interesting. I guess the main concept I'm exploring is the idea that if you don't control for the sound quality that the person mixing it (or more importantly, the person approving the mix) then it's hard to make any claims about how the sound was "meant to be heard".
If you are going to reduce them to the basest level of what the purpose for a speaker or headphone is, to reproduce the input sound, then yes, they are shitty, because they are not good at that.
From a purely objective standpoint, you are going to have to judge them based on that. Why would you want the speakers or headphones to make a different sound than what the signal is?
If you want to move away from an objective measurement of what makes a headphone good or not to something that's purely subjective (i.e. 'I like how they sound'), it's impossible to answer that question.
The Solo2 are a pair of Beats headphones that actually measure really well - they're good at the base purpose of a transducer. But they're $250. You could buy a pair of Sony MDR-7506 that measure similarly (IIRC, a bit better, even) for $85.