Every single person on a college campus wearing ear buds reminds me of Fahrenheit 451. Crazy stuff.
Laying it on kinda thick, aren't you?
There was a recent article on headphone quality. They looked for audio quality for a selection of known brands and compared them. Beats was one of the most expensive, but surprisingly one of the worst on audio quality. A less than $20 pair (Panasonic or something) beat it by a huge margin.
There's a reason some companies advertise the shit out of their product, manytimes it's because the product is shit and wouldn't sell unless everyone thought it was COOL.
Beats have a "sound" which is not about the best possible reproduction of sound. That sounds like bullshit, so let me elaborate. I can design speakers that amplify the bass and add some bass distortion and slightly shift low frequencies towards the bass. That would, as far as accurate reproduction goes, make the headphones terrible. However, that "sound" could be exactly what some people want to hear; to them, it sounds better. Not more accurate, not mathematically better, but better to their ears with the music to which they listen. This would be analogous to cranking up saturation/clarity on a photo; it doesn't look like it did in real life, but some people will like it more. This is pretty different from, say, a blurry out-of-focus photo that's objectively shitty, or headphones that have a bunch of noise and make crackling sounds and are weaker on one side due to corrosion which have objectively shitty audio quality.
More importantly, using math to argue against a luxury item, a fashion statement, an "experience" is not really going to change anyone's mind. But of course it's okay to laugh at those people, but I'm just saying, you're using the wrong argument/criteria if you use math.
I just bought a pair of headphones on a fairly massive sale. Nothing fancy, no fashion statement, and no advertisement that I've ever seen. I wanted good sound, but I didn't ask around to find the most accurate reproduction, I just wanted good sound. The same company makes headphones in the $500+ range which I am sure are objectively better, but would I necessarily enjoy them more?