HP, Dr. Dre plan new 'digital music ecosystem'
Singer Pharrell, Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre pose with headphones from "beats by dr. dre" made by Monster Cable.
(Credit: Interscope Records)A new alliance between hip-hop impresario Dr. Dre, Interscope Chairman Jimmy Iovine, and computer maker Hewlett-Packard aims to save digital music.
No, this is not an attempt to fix the record industry's business woes. The goal is to lift the sound quality of the too-often tinny tunes squeaking out of our ear buds, and it's an ambitious plan nonetheless. HP will release premium-priced laptops, headsets, and software featuring the "Beats by Dr. Dre" brand sometime this fall, music industry sources with knowledge of the offering told CNET News.
In an interview last week, Iovine declined to discuss HP or any other company that may be involved. He confirmed, however, that he and Dr. Dre are part of a plan to reconstruct the entire "digital music ecosystem" from the sound file to the computer and culminating with high-end headsets.
Iovine downplayed the potential for the group's efforts to compete with Apple. The man who discovered rapper Eminem, said he enjoys an excellent relationship with Apple CEO Steve Jobs. In addition, the partnership would love to join forces with Apple and other consumer electronics companies, according to a source close to the company. That said the plan has all the markings of an attempt to lure away those Apple fans who possess a discerning ear. Audiophiles have long lamented the dropoff in sound quality brought on by the onset of digital music.
"We have to fix the entire chain," Iovine told CNET News. "Our position is to go to all the sources and try to improve sound and educate people...We can't put anything weak in the line. Whoever puts out things that sound bad shouldn't be as cool as something that sounds great."
There's room for competitors to take on Apple by offering consumers better sound quality, according to Richard Shim, an analyst with research firm IDC. But he added that those who try it might struggle to move beyond the niche audiophile market.
"There is always an opening," Shim said. "The question is how do you take a doggy door and turn it into a garage door? How do you take something that has a small audience (the market for high quality sound) and push it out to the mainstream."
Studies by the NPD Group show that there are people willing to pay a premium for equipment and software that produce more lifelike music, said NPD analyst Russ Crupnick. But the research also indicates the majority of consumers are satisfied with their Apple earbuds and iTunes songs, which are now available at 256 kbps, he said.
"Listening habits have sort of changed," Crupnick said. "If I'm spending all my time on Facebook and listening to Dr. Dre's music in the background, it's not so important that it be the best."
For HP, the partnership with Dr. Dre is part of a recent marketing trend that has seen the company cozy up to celebrities.
"HP is working to be more visible with influencers and they've been tying themselves to celebrities," said Shim, who cited the collaboration between HP and fashion designer Vivienne Tam on a mini notebook that debuted in September 2008. "In this case, HP was able to charge a premium for a low-end product. This is unique for the PC industry. It's consistent with their marketing strategy."
PC makers are following the lead of the automobile industry by shaping their sales pitch around a consumer's lifestyle, according to Shim. "Up to now, it's all been about speeds and feeds and low costs," he said. "However, now their approach has to mature. They have to attach brand awareness and emotion as well as practical use to reach a greater part of the mainstream audience."
It's not tough to see how HP and Dr. Dre can help one another. HP will lend the "Beats by Dr. Dre" credibility among hard-core sound enthusiasts. In exchange, Dre, who has produced hit albums for Snoop Dogg, Eminem, and 50 Cent, transfers to HP laptops some of his street cred with a younger generation of music fans and computer buyers. Who can argue that Iovine and Dr. Dre don't know high quality sound?
For the music industry, promoting better-sounding tunes is a means to have greater say in how digital music is packaged and sold.
It's a way to take back some control and the big labels want to promote high-quality audio as a new specification. They want to come up with a single standard that sticks.
Iovine said that he and Dr. Dre's efforts are not based on any attempt to save the music industry.
"I just want our product to sound better," Iovine said. "The record business committed many, many mistakes in the last 10 years, and I'm right in there. One of them was letting its product get degraded. It's one thing to let it get stolen, it's another to allow it to be degraded because then you really don't have a chance...video games and TV quality are getting better and the quality of our work is getting lower. If that happens, then music will become disposable. That's something we can fix."
The gear produced by Dr. Dre and Iovine doesn't appear to come from some vanity project by would-be celebrity entrepreneurs. Dr. Dre and Iovine enlisted such artists as Pharrell, Will.i.am, and Gwen Stefani for coming up with the right sound and design of the Beats By Dr. Dre headphones, built by Monster Cable. Together they produced the "Tour" in-ear headphones that were rolled out last January and have since received critical success.
"Monster Cable's headphone collaboration with Dr. Dre, the Beats, surprised us with their musical prowess back in August," wrote Slashgear last December. "While celebrity endorsements tend toward the cheesy, and Monster's products toward the over-priced, we weren't expecting much; in actual fact, they proved impressively capable."
Greg Sandoval covers media and digital entertainment for CNET News. He is a former reporter for The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. E-mail Greg, or follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/sandoCNET. 
Besides, anytime you have a company such as Monster Cable involved, it screams, "We're here to charge ridiculous amounts of money for products that don't work any better than the cheap ones." That's no slap at Monster, because if people are dumb enough to pay those prices, I don't blame them for having an "idiot tax." It's just that people who understand digital signals know that the signal coming through a Monster cable doesn't sound any different than one coming through a cheap cable.
IMO, this will go nowhere. If the products make it to market, they'll be retired quietly after they fail to sell.
Every day I pull up next to idiots who've replaced their receiver with whatever AutoZone special was on sale, possibly swapped their speakers for some cheapos but probably not, definitely not bothered to amp them because I can hear them clipping and distorting nonstop, and thrown a sub in the trunk to rattle the crap out of their license plate, antenna, wiper, etc. Forget quality--they don't even care about hearing what song it is, just blasting obnoxious noise to show off how "ill" their "tight" setup is.
If Dr. Dre can reverse that, fantastic. But I take issue with the "Up to now, it's all been about speeds and feeds and low costs" part. I don't know what feeds are, but I *want* speed and low cost from my computer. I want my audio equipment to be sleek, minimal, powerful, and clean. What I don't want is another campaign to convince me that tacky bling on a cheap gaudy product will help me showcase how unique/independent/empowered I am because the trendy urban types in the commercial said it's part of my "lifestyle".
Call me skeptical, but talking about attaching "brand awareness and emotion" just makes me think Boost Mobile "yo where you at dog!" marketing.
Very well said. And here I thought I was the last of a dying breed.
Are you sure about that? I have 3 iPods; the product is more about portability than sound quality. The ear buds that came with my iPods sound terrible; they remind me of the first transistor radio. Have you listened to the Beats Studio headphones, they are simply amazing.
It's just that people who understand digital signals know that the signal coming through a Monster cable doesn't sound any different than one coming through a cheap cable.
Audio sent across Monster cable is between your amp and speakers? it is analog, not digital. Monster sells a quality product, a product that will never need to be replaced in your lifetime.
You don?t get it.
Next step is to bypass the ipod's internal DAC for home units. The Wadia Transport does an excellent job. I wonder though, if I bought an Apple TV and used the digital out for my itunes library, would this do the same thing? I was very reluctant to purchase an ipod (i've only had one for 6 months), or any mp3 player for that matter, because of the sound quality in digital music. Randomly selected playlists are just too tempting. I have all my music in high bit rate format; now if we could only get these portable devices to play well with peripheral equipment.
But, there are a few of us, artists, producers labels and fans that care about sound and will pay for an upgrade. If you don't, no one is putting a gun to your head to buy our products. In fact, at our label, Blue Coast Records, we allow the fan to listen at 192kbps. the full song.. and offer CD quality and 96K downloads priced at $2/$4 per single.. guess what.. people buy them!
www.bluecoastrecords.com
On another note, I'm well past the current generation, but I will say this... owning a recording studio and mentoring many of the young folks around 20 years old, I find that many get pirated music until they find they like it... then they seek out the vinyl or CD. In fact, most of our intern are learning to work on analog tape and won't go back to digital recording. In fact, outside of the USA, there is HUGE surge of interest in higher quality sonics... so, I don't know where you all have been, but our stats and sales are proving that young and old are buying high quality.
Lastly, I'm not a fan of Monster Cable, cuz I think it's a Monster price for products that aren't that good, but, it also takes MONSTER money to fund and advertise an entire movement, so I'm happy somebody is taking a stand. When I worked for Liquid Audio with the first music downloads in 1997, I learned that it took the MONEY of Apple to get people to change their lifestyle about 8 years later. The same will happen here. Those mp3's you're buying will be free within 5 years. Those that want quality will have it available. As someone who cares about my products and can feel the emotional difference higher quality sound brings... I'm for whatever it takes to get it out there.
Cookie Marenco
it has been the answer.
wise Portable Media Player (PMP) manufacturers have added FLAC playback support to their devices.
unlike MP3, that throws away 39 out of 40 'units' of quality to 'save' space thereby RAPING sound, FLAC is 100% lossless.
FLAC provides 100% of studio quality
FLAC is free from draconian DRM
FLAC is open source: no licensing fees to pass to consumers
yes, FLAC files are larger. So what? Add more storage space. Isn't the point to ENJOY your media?
FLAC is ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE more awesome than any 'low compression' lossy format
DRM = no sale
no FLAC support? no sale
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buying an MP3 is a waste of money
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I want studio quality sound like I receive when I buy a CD
I would buy a FLAC track
dont buy music from itunes,get a cd and use lossless codecs to compress it,theres many out there or dont compress at all,u can also download uncompressed music
unfortunately i dont think an average ipod user cares or knows anything about sound quality/compression,so except for few music lovers and stoners (including those 3 in the pic above) i think the rest will use the crappy white headphones and they will think they look cool but yea i wish them luck,hope im wrong
SACD can be released in hybrid form with CD on the same disc.
This allows a multi channel recording to be included with the normal cd recording.
Why not start releasing these en mass, and then we will have incentive to upgrade to play this format.
Some of us can play these right now, with our existing home theater gear.
Next, encourage car makers to install surround sound in new vehicles, so we can take advantage of this great sound on these discs.
Finally, popular artists much mix their sound so that it will actually sound good on this upgraded gear.
Then the mass market will have a reason to want this.
Audiophiles love their high end gear because the Classical, Jazz and some Rock Artists care very much about the quality of their recordings. And it shows when you hear it on great equipment.
A normal car audio setup is 4 speakers: left and right for the people up front, and left and right for those in back (it also just fills things in with lower volume version of the front, since your placement isn't optimum in a car). A sub lets you just play better mids and highs from the speakers, since low frequencies aren't directional but do take a lot of power to produce.
A lot of car makers have added a ton of superfluous speakers as selling points, but it's useless. You're just repeating the same signal from a ton of places. Lexus takes the cake with its asinine 17 speaker setup. Movies have surround because you're supposed to hear a car driving up the road from behind you or whatever. You don't want to have a random instrument leaving the sound stage like somebody playing behind you.
The higher quality is just finer sampling and a wider dynamic range. The former makes things sound less compressed and more concise--the latter isn't as useful since a car is a pretty poor listening environment with all the noise. You're just never going to pick up subtle details while driving around.
DJ Quik said gangsta rap was done!
The method of reconstructing a soundwave (open earbuds bad, sealed earbuds better, large headphones better, large precision made speakers best) is also an issue, and for the purists, such things as capacitors in a devices' audio playback circuitry are to be avoided.
Many think fundamentally splicing sound into digital samples is a no-no in the first place, and that analogue source materials were never surpassed.
For those cursed with golden ears, you're not going to make them happy with a few tweaks to the bitrate...
I get the marketing, pack better speakers and headphones for listening to music with computers. If you're listening to 256 kbps AAC, the biggest weak link isn't going to be the compressed music but likely your gear. Still as a reader pointed out, selling the media in lossless codecs like FLAC would also go miles towards promoting the goal of superior sound.
Really most people don't care about good sound; good sound to most people is a pair of logitech speakers. I wouldn't mind seeing companies start promoting better sound gear.
I'm mentioning this because if consumers are too stupid to realize your monitors ought to cost the same as your iPod does to get the best sound, what chance do you have of moving to a higher resolution format? The catch-22 is that the higher standard will sound THE SAME on the cheesy headphones 99.9% of consumers use anyway.
If you want higher fidelity from your mp3 player, the best thing you can do is invest in a set of Etymotic in-ear monitors. That will give the vast majority of people all the additional sonic resolution they need. I've been using them since I got my first generation 5GB iPod.
Business is supply and demand. There is simply no demand for this because of mass ignorance, and I'm not sanguine about the chances of creating that demand through education. Sonic standards have actually DECLINED over the past quarter century; first from vinyl to CD, and then from CD to mp3.
So, good luck with that.
- by chash360 August 12, 2009 2:09 PM PDT
- I am for anything that improves the sound quality, I also think the music industry should release complete, independent multi-track versions of artist's work's. Give the end listener a way to truly customize their mix of the music, not just the label's recording enginneer's version of it. personally I love instrumental music, and many songs that do have vocals (even good vocals) I wish I could eliminate at sometimes, without affecting the tonal quality.. This is one way, that may bring consumers back to packaged music.
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Showing 1 of 2 pages (36 Comments)As for those who think this high-end effort is absurd, it takes high quality equipment, thoughout the system, from beginning to end to have really great sound, there is no question. True, most people are satisfied with <$20 earbuds for most of the time, but to claim there is no need or reason to do this, is to say everyone would prefer to drive a little geo, over a cadillac. Do you want earplugs to just block the outside noise, or do you want to really enjoy your music in all of its detail.
There is a market out there for this, just as there is a market for the lexus, cadillacs, etc.
Does anyone doubt, that Bose, has created additional percieved quality in audio reproduction that people will pay a premium for? The difference here is that this is a more complete effort because better quality equipment alone will not make a crappy recording, sound a lot better, in fact it can serve to highlight the poor quality of a recording. In audio, the sound is only as good as the weakest link in the chain.
Will this effort create more 'audiophiles', maybe, maybe not, but audiophiles do exist, and they do demand greater quality and will pay a premium for it, therefore yes there is a market for this, can this effort meet the bar this market sets, I guess we will see.