Engineer Disassembled Beats Headphones And Found This Surprise Inside

Nothing beats (ahem!) a good pair of headphones, especially those that feel solid and substantial in your hands. Like those iconic Beats By Dre headphones you see everywhere you go. Surely they're made with top shelf components that justify their sky-high price of $199, right?

Bolt's prototype engineer Avery Louie decided to see what the Beats headphones are made from and exacty how much they cost ... and he's found quite a few surprises, like this one:

One of the great things about the solo headphones is how substantial they feel. A little bit of weight makes the product feel solid, durable, and valuable. One way to do this cheaply is to make some components out of metal in order to add weight. In these headphones, 30% of the weight comes from four tiny metal parts that are there for the sole purpose of adding weight.

So, how much do the components in a $199 headphones actually cost? Find out at Louie's post over at Medium - via Core77


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Agreed. But does silverware count as portable? What I meant is that, when a device is mean to be portable, the quality aspects differ and lightweight becomes a criteria of quality. I have a pair of foldable, lightweight Sennheisser. They sound great and are also extremely portable. On the other side, those heaphones break easily. I'm at my third or fourth pair by now and if they weren't constructed to be portable, would never have bought them hagain for lack of resistance. But they excell as portable headphones. So do the Koss Porta and this model is already about three decades old and still selling great.
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speakers of high quality tend to weigh more due to the design of a housing that doesn't resonate and color the sound (damping materials, thicker and denser housing, internal bracing) also a decent magnet to push the drivers adds considerable weight. this is why the speakers from a cheap wall mart shelf system weigh just 2-5 lbs (thin cheap plastic shell, no damping tiny crappy magnet) while high end bookshelf speakers weigh 25-80 lbs a piece. some of the ultra high end floor speakers in the 100,000$+ a pair price range weigh as much as 5oo lbs a piece. the same principle applies to headphones on a smaller scale.
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My, how things change. Thirty years ago, every radio station supplied cheap ($20), heavy headphones that the air staff would abuse. They broke regularly, so you couldn't rely on having the necessary equipment at work. So I invested in a set of Sennheiser ultralights for $250, a princely sum for a dj back then. No one touched them but me. They looked so delicate, but worked great for decades.
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