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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

> So how do patents "encourage innovation" again?

On one hand we have Bose, who "for almost 50 years...has made significant investment in the research, development, engineering, and design of proprietary technologies now implemented in its products, such as noise canceling headphones" [1]. On the other hand we have Beats, which dressed up commodity tech in a nice design and well-executed marketing campaign. Not sure if this is the best case to torpedo patent law with.

[1] http://www.scribd.com/doc/235098824/Bose-v-Beats-Civil-Compl... §5

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Every audio enthusiast I know would scoff at that assessment of Bose. They have a reputation for commanding a premium for cheaply made, mediocre products using fancy marketing and gimmickry. They're no different from Beats in that regard.

Do any of the audiophiles on HN know if it's just fashionable to hate Bose or are there actually double-blind studies done in which music listeners consistently rate Bose as worse than price-comparable alternatives?

I'm not an audiophile by any means, but I also get the sense that many around me seem to have disdain for Bose. I also stumbled into possession of QC headphones and some Bose speakers for my house and think they're great. So I've always wondered at what the precisely stated and justified beef is.

There's certainly a lot of hate that only makes sense with audiophile logic, and a lot that stems from Bose not playing the same marketing game that everyone else does. Amar Bose wasn't a charlatan. But like any premium brand that's marketed by marketers rather than engineers, sometimes things end up overpriced and benefits get overstated.

I don't call myself an audiophile but I have owned a lot of different headphones up to the $1500 mark.

There's no need (and no way) for double-blind studies here. We're not talking magic cables. Objectively you can plot frequency results with actual science and measure a difference. Subjectively you can experience it, and of course there is the look, smell, weight, clamping pressure, earpiece comfort and texture of the things as they sit on your head (hence no blind testing possible).

I have disdain for Bose because of their breathless hype, misleading sales practises, high cost and (subjectively speaking) mediocre performance. Lots of people disagree with me and like Bose a lot. And that's just fine.

Well if you selected people that weren't overly familiar with the headphones and blindfolded them, they probably wouldn't know the difference offhand. And the testers would not need to see the people listening.

Bose has consistently made the world's best-performing active noise cancellation headsets.

In home theater, they've targeted the best performance per unit of "unsightliness", so people who are willing to have 10 cubic foot floorstanding speakers scoff at their performance. But nobody can really touch them in price per unit of speaker volume, which is an important aesthetic parameter for Bose's customer base.

The beef if Bose headphone don't sound good.

This comes out in every possible review, subjective ones [0] where Bose headphones are best at noise cancelling and bad at sound quality; or you can try to compare for yourself the frequency response or distortion [1] against a Sony MDR v6 for instance, which retails at 100$ and represent pretty well average quality headphones I think.

[0] http://thewirecutter.com/reviews/best-noise-canceling-headph... [1] http://www.headphone.com/pages/build-a-graph

The lifetime of patents in the US is only 20 years (roughly). Most of those 50 years of innovation are no longer eligible for patent protection, including their original noise cancelling technology. Unfortunately companies seem to be very good at finding ways around this limit.

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