Please picture us having a mug of tea and chatting entirely without the aid of research or statistics, possibly therefore without even facts.

Beats headphones aren’t as good as we’re told.

I was in the aforementioned tea and chat situation last night with a friend. Where you might and a surprising (to me) number of people turn to me for information about Apple, this friend is the guy you would and I do turn to for anything to do with music and hifi.

Let’s call him Steve.

No reason.

I asked Steve about Beats music because I hadn’t heard of it before Apple was in talks to buy the service, its headphones and its people. Steve had heard of it before. He can even pronounce the name of its head guy, Jimmy Iovine, with confidence.

He agrees with just about most things we suspect: he thinks that yes, Apple bought Beats in order to get Iovine. He knows his streaming music and why Beats is considered good at it even though it hasn’t very many listeners compared to Spotify.

But the other thing he knows, as an audiophile, is that the Dr Dre headphones by Beats are not perfect. He doesn’t like them at all but I went searching online and found a lot of praise from them for various corners of the audiophile universe. Except Steve’s problem with them is a problem for every review and every reviewer I could find: these headphones are made to suit bass-heavy music.

Great if you like bass, not so much if you don’t. And despite my being a rubbish audiophile, I don’t like the idea of artificially whacking up the bass on a recording: I know what work goes into making a mix and even if I can’t get it to its best effect, I won’t deliberately change it.

There’s this WWDC announcement tonight. Nobody knows what’s going to be talked about – not really – but maybe Beats will come up in the presentation. I have had such a good time with Apple gear, it has helped me so much, that when Apple brings out something new I will at least hear about it, I will probably take a look. I don’t think I’ll be buying Beats headphones.