This post is going to look at both the great design and also poor design of the Beats Studio 3 Wireless headphones.
Beats are a well-known brand of quality headphones, and the Studio 3 Wireless is one of their many designs. The headphones do not come cheap, with a current price of £349.95. I got mine in a black Friday sale for a fraction of this price, but they were still over £100, so I was expecting a lot.
Firstly, I have to say I love the aesthetic of these headphones. They look luxurious but not tacky, and they are subtle enough to suit any outfit. They are made of high-quality materials, I have had the headphones for a little over 2 years now and I wear them a lot, and they have no stains or marks or scratches. This ticks the box of ‘long-lasting’. The material of the headphone pads feels nice to wear, it's soft and squishy, and the headband is padded, which really improves the comfort when you are wearing them for a long time.
I find headphones uncomfortable generally, and these are the first pair I have tried that I can wear for a long time and not feel any discomfort. It is really easy to adjust the size of them, and they produce a really nice clicking noise when you do adjust them.
The headphones have simple tactile controls and are controlled as seen in the image above. The controls are intuitive, I didn’t need to read any instructions to know how to control them, which embodies Dieter Rams' principle of ‘understandable’. The buttons also give nice feedback when pressed, which makes it easy to know if you have clicked the right section.
They have excellent sound quality, the best I have heard, and the noise cancelling works very effectively, something I love to stop me from getting distracted. From a safety point of view, you can turn on ambient noise cancelling, which allows sounds such as cars and traffic to get through, this is great when running or walking around the busy Glasgow streets.
Despite my praise of my Beats, I do have a few negative comments about them.
The section of the headphones shown above is the perfect spot for your hair to get stuck. If I wear them with my hair down, without fail strands of my hair wrap around them, and get ripped out as I take them off. This is something that I know other people with these headphones have experienced, and for the high price of them, I would have expected this to have been caught and fixed within the design process.
The second issue is related to both the headphone and the case they come with. Firstly, I do really like the design of the case, it complements the headphones well and it is clear to see that they are designed as a pair. It protects the headphones well, the case is hard to protect from bumps and bashes in your bag, and the inside has a soft lining that prevents any scratches and scraps. The design is sleek and well thought through for the most part. The zip is hidden by a layer of material on both the inside and outside, and the use of the logo is once again subtle and classy, I particularly like the embossed logo on the zip.
However, when the headphones are folded into the case they are pressed together too tightly, with one of the headphone pads being pushed against the headband. This has, over time, cause there to be a dent in the padding which slightly miss-shapes them. This is again a small detail, which maybe I only notice as I am studying design, however, I feel for the cost of them, this should have been noticed and rectified. I think that it would be a simple fix of slightly increasing the size of the case to not constrict the headphones quite as much.
My last negative comment is that there are not waterproof, which always makes my nervous wearing them in light rain or during a sweaty gym session. It was made clear in the description that they were not water-proof, and from searching the internet, not many headphones appear to be, so I don’t think of them too harshly for it.
I think in some ways these are a good example of ‘thorough to the last detail’ when you think about the logo on the zip, the hidden cable, and the charger port. However, some of the problems I have mentioned make them fall short of this principle. Despite that, I love my headphones and I do recommend them to people looking for a high-quality pair.
View Beats Studio 3 Wireless on the Beats website:
https://www.beatsbydre.com/uk/headphones/studio3-wireless
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