Many of you took an interest in the Beats teardown post from earlier this week, and we learned a lot about metal being added to a variety of product designs (thanks commenters!). However, a few sharp-eyed readers contacted us with disturbing allegations: Those weren't actual Beats headphones at all, they claimed.



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I couldn't get anyone to go on the record, which is a shame, as I would've loved for this information to be directly attributable to a Core77 reader. But here's what we were able to find out externally:

The prototype engineer who did the breakdown, Avery Louie, never mentions what model of Beats he tore down. But he refers to the price as $199, which is consistent with Beats' Solo 2 headphones. However, the color scheme in Louie's photos doesn't match the Solo 2 offerings, indicating he used Beats' discontinued Solo HD, which also retailed for $199. And here's where it starts to unravel.

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Louie found just two drivers, one per ear, in his teardown. But the Solo HD contains four drivers, two per ear. So it appears Louie's been given a bogus pair. Audiophile Redditor Vantt1 has gone to the trouble of highlighting some internal differences between real and fake Beats in this Imgur page, which shows a crossover circuit absent in the teardown and other discrepancies.



The question you likely have is, how could a prototype engineer be fooled into using knockoffs rather than the real deal? We'll remind you that he's tearing down products precisely because he doesn't know what's inside. One could also argue, however, that he should have been looking for dual drivers if he was familiar with the product description.



Where we can't fault Louie is in supposing these were real Beats products based on the packaging and external appearance. Pirate manufacturers have become so adept at aesthetic duplication that it is shocking. Don't believe us? Take a look at this video, where the TechBreak channel looks at real-vs.-fake Beats Solo 2 headphones side by side:



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Imagine that this arrived via delivery and you're examining the packaging. It is nearly dead-on identical. The only giveaway is the extra languages printed on the box (which the reviewer refers to collectively as "Chinese," but which is in fact Chinese, followed by Japanese, followed by Korean characters, followed by simplified Chinese). The real Beats packaging features only Western languages. However, unless you had both the real and fake boxes right next to each other, this would be unlikely to raise a red flag; it's common these days for lots of products to feature Asian languages on the box.

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Opening the box, there are a couple of additional giveaways—the plastic wrapping on the fakes and the color of the serial numbers—but again, unless you already had a real pair to compare it to and knew precisely what to look for, you wouldn't realize these were indications of fakery. And even with the real and fake side by side and no idea of what to look for, a layperson would be hard-pressed indeed to spot even minor differences.

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The Solo 2 is Beats' lower-priced offering. Their Pro model is billed as their top-of-the-line and comes with a hefty $399.95 price tag. These, too, are being knocked off—and again, you'll be astonished at how far the pirates have taken it:

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This is very troubling, and a much larger issue than whether manufacturers are trying to "fool" consumers with metal or not. It makes me wonder how pervasive the fakes are, and also makes me wonder if consumers will now question the numerous reviews stating Beats' sound quality is inferior; did the reviewer purchase a real pair in the store, or through the mail? Obviously if you buy a new pair of Beats for $10 on eBay, something's up; but if the fakes have infiltrated an Amazon seller and priced them closer to the real thing, it's possible your average reviewer could have unknowingly attained knock-offs. This doubt can muddy the decision-making process of a potential end user, and I think that's bad news.



However, I also sadly realize that none of this may matter. Whether you're wearing a good-sounding authentic pair of beats, a truly bad-sounding authentic pair of Beats or a worse-sounding pair of convincing knock-offs may actually make no difference; it depends on what your goal is in purchasing a particular product. In the video below, tech reviewer Marques Brownlee articulates what some commenters in the original post hinted at, about why some folks will purchase Beats regardless of reviews.