> I doubt that $40 billion of AirPods would be sold every year if most people didn't care about audio quality to some extent.

The original airpods did not sound good at all, so I don't see what your point is here. Yes, they're still better than phone speakers, but if people actually cared about quality they wouldn't sell as much.

> The original airpods did not sound good at all, so I don't see what your point is here. Yes, they're still better than phone speakers, but if people actually cared about quality they wouldn't sell as much.

The point is that there's a $100b+ industry towards selling audio devices.

You can debate to what extent people care about audio quality, and what tradeoffs they're willing to make for better quality, but you can't deny that the majority of people appreciate that phone speakers are not the optimal audio setup.

If people didn't care about quality, they wouldn't put in the money, effort, discomfort, and fuss to use airpods instead of their phone speakers.

In my experience, most people will choose to listen to music directly from a phone or laptop even when there is a good floor speaker system in the same room they could connect to and play through in seconds, because they just don't care.

In what context?

If you're talking about someone hosting a party where they're playing music off their phone/laptop, that's something I've never personally seen before lol

I'm talking about my family members and girlfriend playing music or movies in a room where I have a great stereo system, and not connecting to it, even though they are already paired and just need to click the icon.

I think you hit the nail on the head- people think a big stereo is for volume levels, not quality. They will obviously switch to it when they want things louder, but often not before.

You must not have normies in your life. I'm subjected to cell phone and laptop speakers constantly.

Not sure what your definition of normie is, but that's been my experience across a fairly wide spectrum of US society.

When I went to public high school in rural America, pretty much everyone I knew owned some sort of headphone/speaker system, and they would be used at every party / larger gathering where audio was important.

It depends on the context though. Obviously if someone is just sharing something casual like a Youtube video on their phone, they're going to use the built-in speakers.

Hmm, I know a lot of people who just use the earbuds that came with their phone. I guess those aren’t included nowadays, but for a while there it wouldn’t surprise me to hear that most people had never bought a pair of headphones.

But like always “most” depends on the population. Most people would have no opinions or nonsense opinions on programming languages I guess, because most people have never written a line of code. It doesn’t tell us much about the popular programming languages, the general population is just the wrong one to sample for that kind of info.

>I doubt that $40 billion of AirPods would be sold every year if most people didn't care about audio quality to some extent

Considering the top100, yah, no one cares about audio quality. Airpods are a symbol of status, not a relevant audio accessory, and from a hifi perspective, they are shit. Im not saying they dont sound good, what Im saying is that equalization does miracles when the sound isn't there. The compression format is lossy.

It really depends on you define "most people". Most people have an IQ of less than 100.

So pretentious.

I don't ask people for their IQ score before I spend time with them, but this has held true across the entire cross-section of society that I've personally experienced. When I was working as a dishwasher, everyone would bring small Bluetooth speakers to their area if they wanted to listen to music.

Do you think that people with a certain background / IQ score are not enlightened enough to recognize tinniness or poor sound quality?

You're misinterpreting my comment. I was not implying any correlation between IQs and audiophile-ness. I was pulling out a random example of a counter-intuitive property that "most people" have, though it's clear from your response that I picked a bad example.

Ah gotcha, apologies for misinterpreting.

I can't claim to speak for everybody, but I think that as high-end (relative to previous standards) audio tech has become very mainstream over the last decade or two, most people recognize that the default phone/laptop speaker setup isn't ideal.

Its actually not true, but is that relevant? Can't a simpleton of IQ 60 be the bearer of golden ears? You seem to equate variable "measurable puzzle-solving skills" with common sense and capacity to act on a specific domain; please don't do it, because it makes the rest of us feel sorry for you.

By definition, no they don't.