TECH2

The New Sound of the Studio

After I broke the New Studio and the old Studio in for 10 hours, my fellow contributing tech editor Geoff Morrison and I gave both a good listen.

The old Studio was criticized by some reviewers for overhyped bass that obscured the midrange and treble. The New Studio retains the pumped-up bass, but the tonal balance is much more natural. It sounds like Beats’ engineers kicked up the highs a bit to counterbalance the heavy bass.

I think to most people, the new balance will sound much better. For me, the tonal balance of the old Beats worked only when the music was simple and muscular enough (i.e., hip-hop) to punch through the headphone’s muffled sound. But even a relatively delicate, subtle jazz track like trumpeter Orbert Davis’s “Block Party” (from Priority) sounds good through the New Studio. The New Studio produced a more ambient, spacious sound, something I don’t expect from most closed-back headphones. The piano not only sounded clean, but had a nice sense of “air” around it. The cymbals sounded much more present, but never had the nasty high-frequency sizzle many headphones produce.

The bass was still too amped-up for my taste. But when I engaged my Butterworth Airplane Sound Simulator (BASS™)—a pair of Genelec recording monitors and a Sunfire subwoofer fed with noise I recorded on in a jet airliner cabin with my Earthworks M30 measurement microphone—the bass sounded a bit more in balance.

While I had the BASS activated, I compared the noise cancellation of the old studio vs. the New. The New was obviously better, with much better cancellation of the deep frequencies coming from the Sunfire sub. However, when I turned the BASS off and listened to both headphones without music playing, I could hear a slight hiss coming from the New Studio that wasn’t in the old. It wasn’t the annoying, impossible-to-overlook hiss we’ve heard from a few noise-cancelling headphones—in fact, it was barely noticeable—but I guess some people might find it objectionable. I didn’t.

Getting back to that bass boost: The New Studio’s bass emphasis sounds broader, with less of an apparent resonant peak than the old Studio. This effect gives the bass more detail but subjectively reduces some of the impact. For example, in ZZ Top’s “Chartreuse,” from La Futura, I could hear more subtlety in Dusty Hill’s bass line, even though the bass sounded somewhat bloated at the same time—and it was still too boosted for my taste. I expect some listeners might prefer the resonant kick and over-the-top power of the old Studio’s bass, but IMHO any discerning listener will greatly prefer the new model’s bottom end oveall.

Everything else in “Chartreuse” sounded obviously better through the New Studio. When I changed from the old Studio to the New Studio, the improvement in the sound of the guitars and vocals almost smacked me across the face. The stereo ambience practically exploded, expanding immediately from a tiny, “canned” sound to the kind of colossal sound for which La Futura producer Rick Rubin is best known. Billy Gibbons’ trademark growl sounded smoother and more natural through the New Studio; through the old, it sounded sibilant and phasey. The mids and treble revealed much more detail, never sounding muffled as they could through the old Studio.

I could find only one tune on which the old Studio sounded better than the New: hip-hop artist Wale’s “Love/Hate Thing.” Many of the hip-hop-oriented headphones have a tonal balance that’s basically three boosts, in the lows, mids, and highs. This sounds like hell with most music, but with hip-hop—which is mostly deep bass, vocals, and relatively high-pitched percussion and effects—it gives the music an added kick. That’s exactly what I heard with the old Studio. With the new one, the bass sounded much smoother and better-defined, but the overall presentation was less exciting.

So what did Geoff Morrison—the man who sometimes seems to hate every headphone—think of the New Studio? I can’t quite say he liked it, but he sure didn’t hate it. “The bass is still too much, but it’s not as sloppy as with the old one. It sounds like there’s a ‘hole’ between the mids and the bass. [My measurements would later prove him right.] The response is still too lumpy for me, but overall, it’s not bad.”

Measurements

I measured the performance of the New Studio (and the old one) using a G.R.A.S. 43AG ear/cheek simulator, a Clio FW audio analyzer, a laptop computer running TrueRTA software with an M-Audio MobilePre USB audio interface, and a Musical Fidelity V-Can headphone amplifier. Measurements were calibrated for ear reference point (ERP), roughly the point in space where your palm intersects with the axis of your ear canal when you press your hand against your ear. I experimented with the position of the earpads by moving them around slightly on the ear/cheek simulator, and settled on the positions that gave the best bass response and the most characteristic result overall.

The frequency response measurements suggest that the New Studio and the old one are of similar design, with three major changes. Most notably, the response dip in the old one at 1 kHz has been shifted down an octave to 500 Hz. The new model also has a few dB more average high-frequency energy between 2.5 and 10 kHz. The new one also shows deeper bass response. Adding 70 ohms output impedance to the V-Can’s 5-ohm output impedance to simulate the effects of using a typical low-quality headphone amp has no significant effect (it seldom does with internally amplified headphones). The waterfall (spectral decay) plot looks clean, showing no significant resonances.

You can see in the accompanying chart how much better the New Studio’s noise cancelling is: typically -7 to -10 dB more effective between 50 and 200 Hz. Differences in the physical design of the New Studio also result in a decrease in ambient noise of -3 to -10 dB from 3 to 6 kHz—good for filtering out the hiss of an airplane’s climate control system. No, it can’t touch the Bose QC-15 in this area, but nothing can.

Total harmonic distortion (THD) is a little on the high side, typically running 2 to 3 percent below 700 Hz. The level at which this measurement is taken is high, though—100 dB, A-weighted, measured with pink noise—and I never noticed distortion during our testing.

Impedance is dead flat at 70.5 ohms. Average sensitivity from 300 Hz to 6 kHz, calculated for 70 ohms impedance (I could find no official impedance spec) is 110.0 dB with NC on.

Bottom Line

I used to struggle when people asked me if they should buy the Beats Studio. Much as I disliked the bass-heavy sound, I know some people prize cool styling and a hot brand over sound quality. So I couldn’t in good conscience say, “NO!!! Don’t buy those!” But the New Studio is much better in every way, and I now consider it recommendable. I prefer the more neutral sound of, say, the PSB M4U 2 or the Bose QC-15, but the former’s bulk makes it hard to travel with, and the latter looks about as cool as a pair of New Balance cross-trainers. The New Studio is much better tuned to what most people really want in a headphone: great styling and good sound.

Enough said, but Geoff’s final statement about the New Studio is so on-target I have to include it: “If I saw someone wearing these, I wouldn’t openly mock them as I would with the old ones.”