This is so common in consumer tech. Is there a name for it? Like how any new TV has horrible motion interpolation and sharpening enabled by default, or the bassiness of Bose/Beats headphones.
It takes time and experience to develop, and the masses on average don't have it. As in, they might have developed taste for a few products, but not most products. Hence, the mass-market products are aimed at people with no taste, because that captures the largest slice of the consumers.
Random examples:
- In A/B tests, the typical personal will rate louder music as better. Hence, all bars and pubs turn their music up to 11, to the point that it's horrendously distorted, causes physical pain, and forces everyone to scream at the top of their lungs to be heard.
- Sugary, salty and fatty foods are consistently rated by typical people as more tasty than foods without them. Hence, all fast-food restaurants load their foods up with those elements instead of more expensive flavourings such as herbs and spices.
- Just look at the typical gaming PC market. RGB LEDs are now almost "essential", despite adding nothing material to the performance or capability of the system other than a garish blinken-light-show. You can't see the gigahertz, but you sure can see the LEDs!
- Cars are perceived to be more sporty if they have a loud exhaust with a deep note to it. So of course, every "sports" car has literal fake exhaust that's "tuned" to make this particular noise.
Or they just have different tastes then you do, which is a far cry from having 'no taste'. People consistently prefer and rate headphones with more bass as more appealing, for example. That's why consumer brands are bass-heavy. It matches the taste of the market. If you need a flat audio profile where the mids and highs and bass are all at the same level you have to pick up a pair of studio monitors.
> Sugary, salty and fatty foods are consistently rated by typical people as more tasty than foods without them
Sweet, salty and/or fatty tastes form a pretty solid basis for many delicious snacks/hors d'oeuvres/desserts - highbrow or lowbrow - though I personally like tangy as well as textures like crunchy, creamy, chewy, spongy; and sometimes other tastes like bitter, savory, or piquant as well. These are tastes that humans (and other creatures) have developed and retained over thousands of years.
Omitting sweet/salty/creamy greatly reduces the scope of cuisine.
> Sugary, salty and fatty foods are consistently rated by typical people as more tasty than foods without them. Hence, all fast-food restaurants load their foods up with those elements instead of more expensive flavourings such as herbs and spices.
I love this one. Want to convince someone with an unsophisticated palette that you are the greatest chef in history? Just start loading everything you make with butter and sugar. Salty and sweet === good to most people.
It's even worse with Harley-Davidson motorcycles. They're not just going for low and loud, they have a specific profile that they tune their engines for. It will be interesting to see what they do if they ever make an electric.
I hate motion interpolation with a burning passion and have made it into practically a vendetta and will turn it off anywhere I see it by any means necessary, including downloading a remote application onto my phone and using the IR blaster to turn it off in restaurants and waking up in the middle of the night at friends houses to sneakily switch it off.
For whoever what motion interpolation is also known as is the soap opera effect on movies and I agree, it looks terrible but most people don’t get it, it doesn’t bother them at all.
I’ve never owned Bose nor Beats specifically but more generally I find bassiness is a desirable feature rather than a gimmick for dumb consumers.
With room sized speakers it’s not a problem because you’ll have multiple cones dedicated to the low end and usually some subs too. Thus it’s easy to have a rich low end without sacrificing the fidelity of the higher end. But with headphones that’s much harder to pull off. So you either have a flatter sound or a muffled high end. Thus having headphones that can have a super crisp top end while still still producing a rich and deep low end is very much desirable.
> I find bassiness is a desirable feature rather than a gimmick for dumb consumers
It's perfectly reasonable to find bass a desirable quality. Depending on my mood I'll listen to music with lots of bass, or with little bass. However, I've zero desire to intentionally alter the frequency response so I'm hearing something different than the musicians and mixing engineer intended. Instead I'll just listen to appropriate music for my mood/taste.
Intentionally having a non-flat frequency response is equivalent to adjusting the colour space / colour grading of your monitor to not accurately represent colours. You can do it, and there are reasons why you might want to do it temporarily e.g. blue light filtering in the evening. However, doing so permanently without a specific (medical?) reason is a bit unusual.
If I hadn't been gifted a pair of beats earbuds, I could see myself believing similarly. The ones I was given were very nicely built, with tactile components that felt of significant quality, as though they were assembled with great care. They were also the muddiest, mushiest, and most unpleasant listening experience I've had in the last couple of decades outside of bad laptop / phone speakers or scenarios that used explicitly damaged components. When I first got them I thought that I had received a bad pair, only to find online that the sound profile was intentional.
For a camera it would just be referred to as post processing. You can even see some of this going on when you open the photo immediately after taking it and see it snap in to high quality later. Or the difference between the live viewfinder and the final image.
jiggawatts|4 years ago
It takes time and experience to develop, and the masses on average don't have it. As in, they might have developed taste for a few products, but not most products. Hence, the mass-market products are aimed at people with no taste, because that captures the largest slice of the consumers.
Random examples:
- In A/B tests, the typical personal will rate louder music as better. Hence, all bars and pubs turn their music up to 11, to the point that it's horrendously distorted, causes physical pain, and forces everyone to scream at the top of their lungs to be heard.
- Sugary, salty and fatty foods are consistently rated by typical people as more tasty than foods without them. Hence, all fast-food restaurants load their foods up with those elements instead of more expensive flavourings such as herbs and spices.
- Just look at the typical gaming PC market. RGB LEDs are now almost "essential", despite adding nothing material to the performance or capability of the system other than a garish blinken-light-show. You can't see the gigahertz, but you sure can see the LEDs!
- Cars are perceived to be more sporty if they have a loud exhaust with a deep note to it. So of course, every "sports" car has literal fake exhaust that's "tuned" to make this particular noise.
Etc, etc...
It's all down to bad taste.
RuggedPineapple|4 years ago
musicale|4 years ago
Sweet, salty and/or fatty tastes form a pretty solid basis for many delicious snacks/hors d'oeuvres/desserts - highbrow or lowbrow - though I personally like tangy as well as textures like crunchy, creamy, chewy, spongy; and sometimes other tastes like bitter, savory, or piquant as well. These are tastes that humans (and other creatures) have developed and retained over thousands of years.
Omitting sweet/salty/creamy greatly reduces the scope of cuisine.
ramesh31|4 years ago
I love this one. Want to convince someone with an unsophisticated palette that you are the greatest chef in history? Just start loading everything you make with butter and sugar. Salty and sweet === good to most people.
mark-r|4 years ago
anonymouse008|4 years ago
Taking the iPhone as the mass consumer computer, must mean that as a computing device the iPhone has very little taste…
Which in a sense I can definitely see…
Zircom|4 years ago
tartoran|4 years ago
laumars|4 years ago
With room sized speakers it’s not a problem because you’ll have multiple cones dedicated to the low end and usually some subs too. Thus it’s easy to have a rich low end without sacrificing the fidelity of the higher end. But with headphones that’s much harder to pull off. So you either have a flatter sound or a muffled high end. Thus having headphones that can have a super crisp top end while still still producing a rich and deep low end is very much desirable.
Benjamin_Dobell|4 years ago
It's perfectly reasonable to find bass a desirable quality. Depending on my mood I'll listen to music with lots of bass, or with little bass. However, I've zero desire to intentionally alter the frequency response so I'm hearing something different than the musicians and mixing engineer intended. Instead I'll just listen to appropriate music for my mood/taste.
Intentionally having a non-flat frequency response is equivalent to adjusting the colour space / colour grading of your monitor to not accurately represent colours. You can do it, and there are reasons why you might want to do it temporarily e.g. blue light filtering in the evening. However, doing so permanently without a specific (medical?) reason is a bit unusual.
ShroudedNight|4 years ago
They were awful.
bcrosby95|4 years ago
It's probably best to think about it in terms of food. Your average person has an "unrefined" palate. Be it for food, drink, art, etc.
I think everyone has one of these in some areas of life. You can't be a connoisseur in every field - it takes too much energy.
formerly_proven|4 years ago
Gigachad|4 years ago
Philip-J-Fry|4 years ago