Well, the Solo HDs weren’t so hot. At all. But lets check out the original beats, the studios. Throughout this I will be comparing the headphones to their main competitor, bose.

Design

Like all beats products, these are nice. They feature smooth curves that give the bose style envy. Unlike bose, the exterior is reflective and streamlined. One of the biggest differences is how at the ear cups instead of having odd and obvious joints, you can’t see the joint one bit. This adds a much smoother aesthetic to it.

However, this cannot be defined as lightweight headphones (which luckily they aren’t). Unlike the Solo HDs, they are quite large and heavy and take up a lot of room. These headphones are great for thigns like airplane, car, or train rides, but I wouldn’t go on a run or hike or bicycling with these things. The Solo HDs were light and small, but that is one of the biggest trade-offs to headphones. Smaller size results in smaller sound, which results in degraded sound quality. And hence, the studios don’t have that same sound quality problems as the Solo HDs.

Features

Unlike the Solo HDs, I can actually include a section about features for these headphones!

A key feature would be the noise isolation. No, not active noise cancellation, just isolation. This is where the bose take the gold. The beats by dr. dre studio headphones do indeed have a form of noise cancellation, but it only blocks out the lower end of the sound spectrum. For example, I can still hear a car horn, unlike the Bose. But playing music also blocks out a large amount of sound on top of that.

Value

For $350 MSRP ($300 at an Apple store) it’s quite an expensive purchase. For so much money, you might as well get Bose. They are great headphones, as long as you can fork out the money.