Beats headphones have very heavy Bass, a little bit overpowered Treble, and low Mids. This is basically what you get if you try to make a cheap headphones and add a lot of bass on it. This makes them fun for HipHop but sucks for everything else, specially anything with vocals.

They are, however, pretty good looking (imho), sturdy and extremely comfortable. They have also become (amongst non-geeks) the go-to headphones if you want something good as they don't have time to research the differences between HD598 and HD650.

If you buy a good pair of headphones that are balanced (eg. Sennheiser HD598), you can use a equalizer on your computer to make them sound just like Beats.

Basically, you can make Sennheisers sound like Beats, but you can't make Beats sound like Senheisers.

I agree that some "audiophiles" are susceptible to ignorant beliefs, which they then zealously defend. I used to work with a guy who bought a CD player with a weighted turntable for the CD to sit on, on the grounds that it increased the "stability" of the bitrate. I laughed at the time and I'm still laughing now but he just could or would not understand why such a setup was useless. He'd also claim computers simply could not produce good audio, for some ludicrous reason I can't remember. So I suppose that's the type of person you're talking about.

But remember, the word "audiophile" simply means someone who loves sound, and in practise that means someone who cares about good sound and will expend money and effort to achieve it. I'd count myself in that category, and am annoyed at the misguided noisy minority who give us a bad reputation.

There's plenty of well informed, intelligent audiophiles who know their shit, aren't susceptible to marketing hype, and just want a faithful reproduction of their treasured music. Unfortunately, there's also a certain type of person who needs "something to believe in" in life and so gets on board with this kind of pseudo-religion with about as much credibility as the healing vibrations of crystals. You'll find them at the high-end stereo shop buying $500 ethernet cables (the network packets are so much more vibrant!) or signing up for the Pono kickstarter.

I guess we need to define what you call an Audiophile first. I dont consider myself one. As i think spending over certain amount of money is just silly. In that regards i am just a consumer who expect high quality headphone within a price, that could be around $200 - $300.

To simply put, if you are heavy Bass listener. And dont listen to any type of music other then Rock / Hip Hop. Then may be Beats is perfect.

You could argue most audiophile would embarrass themselves with blind test, but the traits in Beats are so different that any normal human being should easily distinguish it.

I was just wondering the same. I tried a couple of my colleagues headphones when I had left me own at home. He seemed annoyed at me for preferring the 30 euro ones over the 100 euro noise cancelling ones, but I preferred the sound that came from them.