HP, Monster, Interscope and Beats by Dre project
HP, Dr. Dre, Monster and Interscope records have teamed up to launch a series of high-end laptops to help educate the masses about digital music. Jimmy Iovine, president of Interscope said in a recent press release, “We need to start educating young people about how music should sound. Video games and film have gotten so much better but we’re still listening to Mp3s. If something isn’t done then people will start to think of music as a throw away product.”
Their answer is a series of laptops with high end sound cards combined with Dre’s Beats by Dre (pictured) headphones backed by an educational program sponsored by Interscope. Plans are still in the air but the laptop and the headphone deal is sounding like a solid start.
As it stands, internal sound cards for laptops have pretty poor quality digital to analogue converters meaning you either have to plug in an external card or firewire/usb to the laptop which may end up costing a fortune for quality gear plus you have to consider cables, speakers and so on. I am fully behind this project and think it’s a great idea but only if the price point is low. Mp3s gained popularity because they were cheap or even free, sounded decent and you could put ten times the amount of mp3s on a storage medium as standard wav files.
As a musician it’s hard not cringe when people tell me about the terabytes of mp3s they have and how great they sound. Mp3s do not sound good and never will. They can sound as good as CDs but that isn’t a very good medium either and with the lack of dynamic range in modern recording techniques – you realise that we’re listening to songs that are compressed during recording, again for mixing, again for mastering, dithered down to play on a CD then squashed again when it’s ripped as an Mp3. Would you pay for a painting that the artist finished in vibrant reds and greens only to have it delivered to you in a dull watered down pink?
Both cup headphones and in-ear buds will be available, my preference will be the cup headphones.
Featured Contributor: Eric McDonald
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