Some New Evidence that Generation Y May Prefer Accurate Sound Reproduction - Page 3

Agreed.


I'd like to see your evidence to back that up. The above is an unsupported assertion, in case you didn't notice it.


I don't know what that means.

I suggest that you base your arguments on reasonable price points, such as lets talk about earphones versus headphones costing about the same amount of money.


How do consumers shop for headphones that is different than how they shop for earphones?

You are stating the obvious. The sentence begins with "I think" and uses the subjunctive mood, which makes clear that that assertion is not a certainty.

Anyway, I'm not interested in getting into the quote sniping (or quote parsing) game. It often makes these threads in the Audio Theory, Setup and Chat forum unbearable to read when that happens.

As far as college students, most don't have a lot of spending power, as we have often seen here on AVS when they come in with very low budgets for purchasing 2.1 or HT audio setups. There are certainly some that will save up their money and go out and spend $200-$300 on a pair of Dr. Dre beats, but this I suspect is as much a status symbol purchase as anything else. Even $100 is a very expensive luxury item for many college students.

Similarly, I'm not interested in random opinions from people who don't seem to have much real world experience with the type of product they are making global statements about, or care what anybody thinks but them, or base their opinions on thin air.


I have a fairly extensive IEM collection, most of which cost less than $100 but several of which cost considerably more.

It is my experience that IEMs have unsurpassed response at the lowest frequencies, when they are properly fitted and seal well into the ear canal. Many people never figure out how to fit their own IEMs to their ears.

As far as your Etymotics go, a set of them are in the higher priced segment of my IEM collection. They were always a disappointment and I hardly ever use them.

This statement with an ad hominem attack and hasty generalizations are logical fallacies that negatively affect the ethos of your argument and do nothing to invalidate my argument.

That being said, your previous post point out how " a given set of earphonesworks differently in different people's ears. The *room* (ear canal and eardrum) that the earphone works with changes its acoustic frequency response, just like happens with loudspeakers in different listening rooms. . . ." So you argument that your experience with IEMs is useful evidence is contradictory to your previous argument because it cannot be universally applied as representative of other people, by your own reasoning.

Without statistical data to support the claim that "many people never figure out how to fit their own IEMs to their ears," that assertion has no more validity than claims you have objected to of mine. On the other hand, if this assertion is true, then it would help support my claim that consumers find that headphones have better bass than earphones.

Finally, stating that "IEMs have unsurpassed response at the lowest frequencies" is a sweeping generalization that cannot be proven. By your own arguments in other threads, it would take ABX testing to determine that this is true for IEMs vs headphones. Yet, how could one design an ABX test to easily prove this short of shooting someone's ears full of Novocaine? It would be impossible not to know whether one was wearing headphones or IEMs during the listening test, among other problems.

The same thing can be said about loudspeakers, headphones, and of course earphones. So what to do? You appear to be a headphone advocate, but you've got the same beam in your figurative eye.

Also, you're attacking my experience as if I'm the only person with favorable experiences with IEMs.


Not true. The medical effectiveness of hearing aids which are basically IEMs with microphones and amplifiers attached supports my claim. If you wish to attack established medical technology, please be my guest.



On the other hand, if this assertion is true, then it would help support my claim that consumers find that headphones have better bass than earphones.


It is an easy claim to understand if one has some understanding of the physics of electroacoustic transducers and human ears. Sue me for being an engineer with education and experience in these areas. ;-)


No, ABX can only do things like compare specific implementations and establish things like thresholds of reliable detection. Wrong way to answer the question.

I see your problem being that you spent a fair amount of money on highly regarded IEMs that happen to sound bad to a lot of people, you and I included.

If at first you don't succeed...

BTW I own about equal numbers of IEMs and good quality headphones, maybe a dozen each. The IEMs I like best were made by Futuresonics, with some Shures being among the ones I actually use the most. My all time favorite headphones are Sennheiser 580/600 .

It's an interesting premise but is it right or for that matter does it matter in any significant way?

For those of us old enough, we may remember the Coke vs. Pepsi challenge. This was a series of commercials where consumers were asked to sit down and sample two unmarked cups of soda: one Pepsi and one Coke. After that they were asked which they preferred. After taking sips from each cup, the majority chose Pepsi. Then something interesting happened. Pepsi was taking market share away from Coke and in a business where a percentage point means quite a few millions of dollars, this is serious business.

Coke took this matter seriously and commissioned their own tests. No matter how they were run, where they were run, etc. the results came back the same. People, even their own people, preferred Pepsi. So, what was the reason? Well, one significant difference is that Pepsi had a bit more sugar. Management said that the formula for Coke, which had remained unchanged for decades and was more closely guarded than our nuclear secrets, needed to be changed. So, the scientists at Coke tinkered with the formula and eventually came up with one that among other things had a bit more sugar than Pepsi. Most importantly, when they reran the blind tests, Coke came out on top.

So, months later, Coke made an announcement that they were shelving the old formula and the new and improved one would take its place as Coke. All is good, right? Wrong. The announcement resulted in a veritable sh!t storm of protests. It became a part of the news. "Coke has betrayed me. I can't believe I can't drink the same Coke as my parents and grandparents drank. What right do they have to take away what I've loved for years." This was totally unexpected for Coke. Despite coming up with a formula that tested better, people were protesting and the protests were getting louder. People were vowing never to drink coke again. T-shirts protesting the new formula were selling like crazy. And sales, well they were even worse.

Management then decided to bring the old formula back, calling it Coke Classic, and after a while things came back to normal. Coke regained the market share it had lost and all was well. But how was it that a series of blind tests that proved one thing could have had the results it did? What went wrong?

The answer turned out to be fairly simple. The way the blind test was performed was wrong. People don't sip their soda, they quaff it down. They open a can or bottle and sometimes in one long gulp, it's gone. So, you wind up getting different results depending how you drink soda. For sure there are other factors, but this will do for now.

Who are the Millennials or Generation Y? If I ask Sean or Arny, who is LBJ, odds are they'll reply it's Lyndon Baines Johnson. Ask a Millennial and they'll probably say it's LeBron James. Paul McCartney performed at the recent Grammies but there were people in the audience who had no idea who he was. Off-shore oil drilling has always been prohibited. They keep in touch by texting, tweeting, or Facebook.

So, Sean conducts a series of tests by bringing young adults in to listen to music and they tend to prefer the more accurate presentation. They sit down, listen to this and then that and then choose. They choose accuracy but is there something fundamentally flawed with the way the test was given? Perhaps so. Generation Y is different from myself who just recently turned 60. I grew up having to get up to change the TV. For that matter, I had to get up to change the record that was playing on my turntable. So, without a remote control, I would sit through the commercials and generally listen to an album in its entirety.

So, what does Gen Y do? The answer can be seen in the article, Study: Young Consumers Switch Media 27 Times An Hour. 27! Just like the flawed, but interesting soda challenge, Sean's test is also flawed because it's not a realistic representation how young adults consume media and music after all is media. Hence, they're not at all likely to sit down and just listen. They're going to be listening for a while then they're attention is going to move to the next, and the next, and the next thing. For sure, if the video or sound sucks they'll switch to something else. But while they're listening, they're also checking Facebook. They're tweeting. They're pinning on Pinterest. They're doing a whole host of things that me, who is a baby boomer isn't doing.

Perhaps Sean's test is overstated or over emphasizes the conclusion. They may well enjoy better speakers or better headphones, but it doesn't seem to me they'll be likely to change the constant media channel changing pattern. In fact, I suspect their general behavior will largely remain the same because what's more important to them isn't the frequency response, it's the content of what they're consuming.

To see how generations change, check out this link: http://www.beloit.edu/mindset/book/

This would be true if you had a blind test where people drank half a can of Coke and half a can of Pepsi and preferred the Coke. But you don't have that. So logically it's a very long stretch. (If it were true, surely Coke would have discovered it, and TV would have been plastered with ads about the results.)

The more plausible answer is that people prefer Coke when they know what they're drinking, because they think they like Coke better. They associate it with something classically American or something. (Coke Classic was a very apt name.)


This is true, but it doesn't disprove Sean's conclusion. It's still the case that younger listeners prefer accurate sound reproduction. (And I think it's significant that the Gen Yers showed the same preferences as older listeners, which suggests that the generational distinction here might not be so great after all.)

That younger listeners get distracted by other things suggests, instead, that while they may prefer accuracy when listening carefully, they listen carefully less often than older listeners. And so they might not value accuracy enough to pay a lot for it. If you're in the business of selling highly accurate speakers (as Sean's paymaster is!), that's not necessarily good news.

The other relevant consideration is that Gen Y is going to grow up one day. They're going to buy houses and have big-screen TVs and watch movies and want home theaters. So they are liable to value accurate sound reproduction more as time goes on.

I gave a very, very brief overview of the reason for the preference for Pepsi. Also, don't overstate Coke's prowess back when the commercial ran. A more detailed and entertaining one can be found in the book by Malcolm Gladwell, Blink. Consumers as a rule don't sip soda and Generation Y as a rule, doesn't sit down and pay attention to one thing.



Sure, but a test that more accurately reflects the habits of Gen Y would be more meaningful.


And if you're in the business of selling a product through advertising that's also not necessarily good news! Sean's paymaster is in the business of selling. I have reservations that the speakers JLo was listening to in the Harman commercial (seen it?) were highly accurate.


Maybe but right now Gen Y isn't buying houses and they don't look at owning a home as the American Dream. They may well have big screen TV's but they're channel surfing, throwing up multiple screens to catch different thing, iPad'ing, tweeting, and are voracious consumers of content. They are different from you and me.

Slightly off topic, but we must also take into account connectivity when discussing convenience. For example, while my Android phone now has an app that supports FLAC, bluetooth/A2DP (721kbps) just doesn't cut it. I won't even get into how horrible cellphone DACs are

Too brief. Whereas my overview was just brief enough:

Fact #1: People prefer the taste of Pepsi in blind tests.

Fact #2: People prefer the taste of Coke in sighted tests.

They were sipping in both tests. So it's not the sipping. It's the sight.


Can't say I'm a fan. Does Gladwell offer any evidence for the sipping-vs-gulping hypothesis?


Meaningful of what? If you want to know what people's true listening preferences are, you do a test like Sean did, eliminating other variables. I can't tell what you want to test, or how you propose to test it. But I suspect any such test would throw in enough noise to make conclusions impossible.

I think you're confusing two separate questions: What does Gen Y prefer, and what will Gen Y buy? Sean was addressing the first. You want to address the second. That doesn't make Sean's test flawed.


And yet they seem to share our generation's preferences in sound reproduction!

Interesting. Your argument continues to want to turn toward the personal, rather than focusing on the issue, and in doing so, it reveals a willingness to further make assumptions without evidence and make sweeping generalizations, which appears to be an attempt yet again to discredit me. For instance, you cannot possibly know how I acquired the Etymotics or how much I paid for them (as a matter of fact, they were a much appreciated gift from a family member). Reviews are also extremely positive for the Etymotic ER-4 series, such as this one from Audioholics, and there are tons of equally positive individual testimonials on the Internet. Nor would you be correct in assuming I don't like them. They work very well for what they are--extremely portable in-ear phones with passive noise cancelling benefits. But they, like other IEMs I have experienced, don't equal the same SQ performance as comparably priced headphones.

There's an old saying, "attack the writing, not the writer." When an argument repeatedly veers away from focusing on the issue to use logical fallacies to discredit the opposing view point and the other author, it's reasonable to question whether or not the rest of the argument might similarly be based on faulty claims that have not been substantiated because of the possibility that (a) the author is willing to use such rhetorical techniques when they know better or (b) the author does not understand logical reasoning. So while I do not dispute that you might have the experience you claim, the rhetorical strategies used in your argument call into question the other unsubstantiated claims in your argument.

Particularly when your argument also make statements like, "you're attacking my experience as if I'm the only person with favorable experiences with IEMs." If you reread my post, I'm not so much attacking your experience, other than questioning whether or not it's universally applicable, based on reasoning that your argument has already provided, to point out the contradictory nature of your own argument. I grant that you believe what you believe. I just question whether or not your summative evaluation would hold true for the entire marketplace.

On the other hand, I do question the bias in your personal testing. Certainly, if it were possible to conduct such a test, ABX testing would allow you to compare a set of headphones to a pair of earphones to confirm that the latter indeed did produce better bass for your experience, much like people compare speakers with their setup to avoid the bias of personal comparison.

Moreover, "understanding of the physics of electroacoustic transducers and human ears" would not prove that "IEMs have unsurpassed response at the lowest frequencies" unless you've taken a sufficient number apart to study, understand, and test their design, and then likewise doing the same with headphones in the comparable price range.

So to reiterate, I still believe that consumers (college students particularly) are finding that headphones offer better audio quality at the same price point. Am I 100% certain of this? No. Do I have to be. No. It's just an opinion, not a statement of fact.

Bolded comments above were added by me. It is sight for sure which ties into the effectiveness of the advertising but it's also the manner of consumption. This is why I question the relevancy at this time of Sean's findings.



The manner of consumption is well known in the food industry. Length of time on the tongue, nose, saturation of taste buds, odor cells all play a role. It's not an unreasonable proposition.



Maybe. Maybe not. If the conclusions are indefinite then we're back to good old Jenny from the block stuff like this.




The first requires an artificial construct that's not realized by Gen Y's consumption of media. Results may be the same and maybe this will be the result of further work.


Do they? Maybe they share our and past generations ability to be influenced by other factors.

Uh, no. Sean's test actually minimizes those other factors. Your objection is that it does so—that their listening preferences would be different if those other factors were included in the test.

But one thing we know about listening tests is that they require concentration to do your best. Of course Gen Yers won't have the same sound-quality preferences if they're busy flitting between media—they won't have any sound-quality preferences in that case, because they aren't paying attention to sound quality at all. But in that case, they aren't any different than anybody else. We all have the same limitation.

So I don't think your observations really have anything to do with generations, or age.

What Sean was trying to do was to push back against the notion that Gen Yers actually prefer lower quality sound (presumably because that's what they've gotten used to). That's an important consideration for audio companies. Do they try to produce good-sounding equipment, and market it as such? Or do they just cheap out on quality, and put all their emphasis on portability and everything-everywhere-anytime technology?

Sean's findings don't answer those questions. But they do suggest that the first approach is worth considering.

Not limited to GenY and the proof is following the idiots on the phone or texting etc when driving. It is epidemic IMO and I don't buy into some people can do it and some can't. I don't think humans are very good at doing more than one task at a time at least doing it well.

If the majority of media consumed by Gen Y is through their phones, tablets, HT or speaker set-ups, and they're all fighting for attention, then whatever Sean is pushing for WRT to FR and all that, largely doesn't apply. Or if it does, it does so for a very small segment of the market. Even in that small segment of the market, I'd hazard to say Harman makes products where the work he and others have done takes a back seat. I hope Sean returns to this thread and offers up some comments.

Even granting this, two points:

1) It doesn't mean his research is "flawed." (Your word, I believe.) It just means it may have limited applicability as far as the marketing department is concerned.

2) What makes you think this is only about Gen Y? Most people I know have Bose Wave Radios. Concern for audio quality was always a niche market.

1) Don't take me too literally. I can live with limited applicability but it might be very limited. This doesn't mean I don't appreciate good speakers. As for headphones over ear buds, I don't know the reason why. Might be just a temporary trend.

2) Sean limited it to Gen Y and that's where I've confined myself. A place I sometimes buy my tires has a wave radio. Could be worse.

Yeah. My nephew's phones are SkullCandy(sp?). I think the name may be more appealing than the sound.


Actually, he hasn't. He's done essentially the same test with his expert panel and a variety of other folks, mostly older than this particular sample. What's revealing, at least to me, is that the Gen Y responses pretty much track the other subjects.


Agreed. As table radios go, it's pretty darn good.

Brings to mind a study not too long ago where they put kids to the test to see if they actually were better adept at juggling multiple tasks; texting, homework, music, etc. Turns out they're not, according to the study (sorry, the details of the study design escape me). The kids they tested had less focus when doing multiple things and were more prone to making mistakes. Just like everyone else, regardless of which generation.

I'm not sure about that. Generation Y listens to HTIBs and IEMs which generally sound fantastically better than the 5-tube AC/DC AM radios that the older boomers (such as I) started life with. As bad as the AM home radios were, the first AM portable radios were even worse.

There has been a steady progression. Good sound used to come just one way, and that was from a relatively large, expensive and power-sucking home stereo that was fixed in place and took hours to relocate.

The first Walkman was a quantum leap forward but it was still hobbled by analog tape technology and small headphones are necessarily compromised.

So now, for about $30 you can buy a Sansa Clip which has the same measured performance through its headphone jack as a really good home stereo has through its power amp's output , and $30 spent well can get you IEMs that have bass that is just as clean and deep or deeper as a $1500 subwoofer with midrange and treble to match.


If you are talking about Harman's large position in OEM automotive sound, Sean has influence on that as well. Harman also has a position in computer sound, both desktop and laptop.

Which just points out that both golden ears and golden brains don't exist. The human body has finite limits, many of which we already know.