Dr Dre's Beats plans to drop HTC, hook up with rich mate – report Beats Electronics is reportedly looking to ditch its HTC partnership and bring in a new investor with fresh funds instead. The maker of the popular Beats by Dr Dre headphones, which is branching out into speakers, car audio systems and online music streaming, wants to find a new investor that will help the business grow, …
Same reason Chef's don't use the pans they endorse, because it's a cheap clone of something decent sold at an inflated price due to having a name on it.
I can buy a decent brand T-Shirt for £20......put a logo on a Chinese cheap one and it'll fetch £50.
You don't think Thierry really had a Renault Clio do you?
Stuff like Beats Audio is all about "colouring" the music. Increasing the bass or treble.
When mixing you want to hear the signal with a flat response, so you are hearing an accurate reproduction of what the end result is.
Quite often people will also have some shitty speakers as a test rig to hear what it will sound like on a car stereo or cheap HIFI. This is why modern music has the dynamics compressed to hell so it sounds good and loud on very poor speakers.
The idea of having accurate sound reproduction (with a little warming of the sound) seems to have gone out of the window. With MP3 and lossy rubbish being the mainstay its no wonder people want the sound colouring so much.
On the plus side, there's no better way of proclaiming "I am a complete fucking wanker" than wearing a pair of these things on your brainless head. Although this can be accentuated by holding your phone in the air whilst nodding backwards and forwards along to the shitty bland music you're subjecting everyone else to.
Go into your phone Settings. Check the section under Device, where when you don't have headphones plugged in, the Beats Audio setting is grayed out and shown to be OFF, with the explanation:
"Beats Audio is not available on phone speaker"
So that ringtone sounds great without Beats Audio.
Its tinny and nasty.
i've had to explain myself to the transport police after smashing some little shits phone to pieces after a 4 hour west line train journey where aforesaid little shit would not stop playing his crap music out loud so we could all hear his lack luster taste in music on repeat.
A combination of being polite to the copper vs little shits bitching and my having a sick 3 year old girl with me got me off the rap
I would do it again to the next little shit who thinks its a good idea to "share"
You can turn it off, you know. It's basically just a 'loudness' button in software, the same result can be had by turning up all the eq sliders. That said, it is actually quite useful. I have beats on when plugged into the car stereo, and off when using headphones, easier than fiddling with the eq profile each time.
"You know Dre is 48 yrs old, right?"
That's not the point, it's the age range of the market he aims at, not how old he actually is - besides, it's about image and expectation, not reality.
In fact, you've now provoked me to cast ignorance aside, and look him up Wiki*. I imagine HTC thought they were on to something with the youth market, but I do wonder if there's a co-relation between their recent market downfall and surrounding themselves in a brand associated with...
gangsta rap
"Death Row Records"
"Detox"
... and a film role as a weapons dealer.
This article below is a bit old now, but I wonder if some of the trends noted match with the niche that HTC have dug themselves into...
http://www.audiblehype.com/blogs/business/2008/aug/04/the-no-bullshit-guide-to-hip-hop-demographics-part-one/
Somehow I can't imagine Apple or Samsung making the same mistake.
* with apologies for Wiki accuracy, as ever.
I'm not sure how much of this applies to phones but I saw a bit of technical info on how HP integrated beats audio into their stuff a few years ago, here is a gimmicky commercial on the topic
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7y6azvuNis#t=1m54s
(for some reason I've noticed that youtube doesn't skip to the right point in the video on the first try on many occasions, so if your bored and it doesn't work just skip to the 1min 54s marker)
I have 2 HP touchpads with beats audio and I've always felt the sound coming out of them was just pretty amazing. I don't know if they are doing the circuit isolation and stuff like HP did in the laptops. But the Touchpad blows the doors off my $2000 toshiba Tecra Intel i7 laptop which I bought a year earlier. Not sure what work HTC did on their phones with beats, I don't believe HP/Palm ever released any phones with beats audio. On the touchpad the audio is quite loud, and sounds great from the internal stereo speakers(the touchpad chassis itself feels a bit hollow on the inside perhaps making for better bass? I can certainly feel the thing vibrate when there is bass). By contrast the headphone audio jack is not loud enough though to the point where it's not really usable on an airplane without an external amp to boost the signal which is unfortunate.
I hooked a $5-10 (forget) pair of mini speakers on my laptop helped a lot though the extra cables are annoying.
At least to me, not being an EE the technical bits behind the computer/tablet etc seem pretty neat, perhaps things are less innovative on the headphones part.
I am not an audiophile by any stretch.
It's all about the question "how do you advertise your laptop as having better sound quality than average?" when it is not an attribute easily expressed by numbers (like a CPU benchmark, screen res or HDD size.)
A common answer is to use somebody else's already-established name, as Apple did with Harmon Kardon on the first iMacs, and as other laptop makers have done with the Bang and Olufsen name - along with their IcePower Class-D amplifiers, Samsung ditto some years ago (even building a B&O-designed phone). To a lesser extent, some end-products advertise their use of a branded component, such as a Burr-Brown DAC for example.
LG's new flagship Android phone shows some promise for audio - it has the audio hardware (and drivers and APIs) for 192Khz 24bit audio, and they claim they have put a lot of effort into the handset's audio path.. whether this effort has paid-off, I don't know; look out for reviews if this interests you. I've noted that some specific versions of the Samsung Galaxy II and IV are well thought of on audiophile forums, having a Wolfsen DAC.
I took my teenage son around the stores to find him some decent headphones.
He likes all sorts of music, Daft Punk and the like.
Ended up in a Best Buy because they had some you could listen to.
Without doubt he said that the Dr Dre headphones were the worst of what was available by a long way. I have to agree.
He preferred the Sennheiser cans. They were a little more but the sound and insulation were just in a different universe.
The ones I have here at work for the laptop are some some Panasonic cheapies and they're pretty good for the price.
Sounds like Beats are trying to disassociate themselves from a company that's losing and, in some people's opinion, may disappear in the coming years.
as for the Beats gear, I was recently in a Radioshack (don't ask me why!) and two kids, probably about 8 or 9 years old, came in asking where the Beats stuff was. they then stood oohing and ahhing at all the overpriced gear. Beats certainly got that marketing right!
If you want really good sound from your mobe, plug in an external DAC. See here:
http://www.head-fi.org/t/595071/android-phones-and-usb-dacs
My 'cans' of choice for mobile use are the Sennheiser HD25-II. Closed back (so good isolation), great sound (used by sound recordists) and robust. Everything is replaceable too.
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