omecene wrote:Need to purchase headphones for my 13 yr. old son to use while playing drums - He wants beats by dr. dre - Which are better? I know nothing about this stuff - looking for some expert advice. Thanks
If protecting your son's ears during drumming is the goal, you may want to get a lot more aggressive about using stronger "passive" noise protection (like these over at Woot parent site http://www.amazon.com/Howard-Leight-1030110-Noise-Blocking-Earmuff/ or similar products). They physically block sound by covering the ear to block the outside noise. Different sizes of headphones, different materials, and how hard they "squeeze" your head to keep out the sound means that there are lots of differences across models.
I haven't seen any Beats product that would do that job properly. And I agree with other Wooters who say most of what you get with a set of Beats phones is branding/styling, not audio results.
This Klipsch set will block some sound, sure, due to the foam cup that surrounds the ear, and seems to do a good job from the reviews Wooters pointed to, but they won't work as as well as specialized products meant to protect hearing. It all depends on how much you're trying to attenuate the amount of total sound reaching the eardrum.
I've played in bands with loud gear; I speak from experience, I wish I'd had a set of those blocking headphones years ago.
Also, part of the overall noise cancellation effect in the Klipsch (and similar competeing products) is due to "active noise canceling" technology in addition to any blocking that a headphone set provides. (There are a lot of these products, with widely varying effectiveness; David Pogue did a good review in the NY Times on them a while back)
Models with active noise canceling use electronic circuitry and a batter to reduce the total amount of background noise that reaches the eardrum, by using microphones to capture the sound in the listening environment and generating the "opposite" sound signal. Summed together, you get less noise reaching the ear canal.
If you're son is anything like I was, you're going to have two challenges here: keeping the MP3 player (or whatever sound source) down, since they can play punishingly loud, regardless of how much the earphones are trying to reduce environmental noise. Also, lots of these products look, uh, unhip--if you're lucky, you'll find one that looks good enough so your son actually uses it when you aren't around.
