Again with the "footsteps".

Why does every "is good for gaming" review of headphones have to include how well footsteps come through? How many of us are actually pro gamers, really?

Also, have you heard a lot of real-life explosions? You'd have to have, to know if an explosion sounds "super realistic" or not.

I'm no expert, but I'm pretty sure any loud, sudden sound is going to be scary, more often than not.

Also, sound engineers for games don't always make "realistic" explosions - they take artistic liberties to modify and twist sounds to make them however they want - including explosions. I mean, if you're playing Halo, and a plasma-something explodes... how in the world are you going to have a base line for how that's supposed to sound, this sci-fi, made up thing?

tl;dr - there's more to gaming than footsteps and explosions, and explosions are not always mixed to sound "real" to begin with, so this praise of Sundara isn't reliable data. In the end, you should always try a headphone and see if you like it.

You don't have data to determine the scope/range of the data you do have... so you're just going to go ahead and take the data you do have as fact/the whole picture, and call it a day?

We don't know, therefore we should not accept the negative reviews as representative of a good cross section of the population.

...

Anyway, the number is approx.15,600.

"22.7K requests·15.6k Sold·" -drop.com

So, if you've actually seen more than 156 reports of failure, then I guess don't buy one.

I can almost guarantee you, if you actually asked "How many of you have no problems with yours", you're going to get more stories of a good time being had, than you are going to get stories of failures, using your post as-is.

Products that reach consumers rarely have as high of a failure rate as social media/bad reporting bias would lead you to believe. It's some small number of units, for any product, ever, that sees failures. If a product sells a million units, and a different product sells ten units, and there's a 1% failure rate across both products, you'll never see a single complaint about the rare product, but you'll see ten thousand complaints about the popular product - despite the failure rate being the same*.*

I bought my 789, used, on Ebay. I've only had it for a month - if it explodes into a billion pieces, I'll let you know.

And then I'll probably fix it or something.

Do you have a recommendation I can add to my Amazon cart?

No, but reporting bias is, however, related to the total number of experiences/devices in the wild, in general.

So, if you have a very popular, very hyped, relatively inexpensive, "pretty much end-game" amp that, say, 100,000 people buy, and you compare it to an amp that only 10,000 bought, and 0.1% have problems, you might hear 100 bad stories of the popular device, and only 10 bad stories about the less common device.

So, let me ask you: do you know how many 789s are out there?

I don't remember anything about, really.

I'm reminded of this one time a roommate sat the rest of us roommates down, and was, like, "let's watch movie together", and after some poking around on Netflix, he found one he thought sounded interesting, so he started it, and about five minutes in, everybody but him was, like, "Dude, what is this, porn?" And he was, like, "No way! It's on Netflix! Let's just keep watching and see where it goes."

About five more minutes in, it was hilariously obvious that it was a soft-core porn flick. We bailed, and he, for once in his life, admitted he was wrong.

For a while, the rest of us were, like, "Hey, rememeber that time you tried to get us to watch porn with you on Netflix?"

Some of us are on this journey for the benefit of video games.

And, on that note, let me take a moment and just say that "I can hear footsteps so clearly and from forever away" isn't the only measure of a headphone for video games. In fact, I absolutely don't care about that, because I'm neither a pro gamer, nor am I trying to be, and also I'm not over here only playing CSGO and Overwatch - other video games exist.

And when I did play 1,000 hours of CSGO, it was mostly me running around with the Negev, because nobody really expects Negev on round two, and nobody expects a Negev to just sit there and hold the trigger down the whole time.

It's just so weird to me that every time I search for something about headphones and video games, the conversation is always, "You can hear footsteps so good - you'll get the competitive edge", and the response to that being, "Sweet - I'll get those then". Like, to the request of "gaming", and nobody clarifying what kind of gaming.

And for movies, it's always, "It has punchy bass/good low end - great for movies", and it's like... there are other movies besides Transformers and Die Hard. I don't need punchy bass for Encanto or The Princess Bride.

/rant