There’s a relatively nascent audio brand – I won’t say the name– which prides itself on producing bass-heavy headphones built for seasoned rockers, the sort of people who pump metalcore, nu-metal and post-grunge into their brains at such ear-splitting levels that their exasperated mothers were endlessly forced to advise a serious reduction in volume. “I shouldn’t be able to hear what you’re listening to through your headphones”, was the usual, and unquestionably accurate, refrain in my house growing up, “you’ll damage your eardrums”. Considering what I now do for a living, I hope such prognostications don’t turn out to be true.
What struck me about the marketing for this particular brand of headbanger-ready headphones was that they seemed to have missed the point of the genre they were aiming to serve. The mean, industrial-looking cans promised lavish helpings of booming bass for the tattoo-plastered mosher in your life, as though a burly reproduction of the low end was all that a person into such forms of musical output should care about.
