Products |
Beats Over-the-Ear Headphones
By
Published: Jul 24, 2013
Category:
Gifts and Gadgets
On the streets of Manhattan, two products are ubiquitous: the iPhone and Beats headphones.
Indeed, they generally go together: the iPhone pumping music through a brightly colored wire into the unmistakable Beats cans. [Term of art: the kool kids call over-the-ear ‘phones “cans.” You can too.]
This is not a craze that started with a couple of hipsters in Brooklyn. It began as a major celebrity thing. Eminem. Katy Perry. Bieber (natch). Lebron. Lil Wayne (his are studded with diamonds and cost $1 million). Snoop. Diddy. Will.i.am. Hugh Jackman. Gaga. And now — because no one knows better what’s trending than 11 year-old girls — our child and her crew.
I asked the child why it was so important to own Beats. She can be quite the chatterer when so inclined, but she had no words on this subject. Her silence said it all: “Beats are their own reason.”
Okay, you’re not so shallow as to buy something in order to wear a style statement. Your interest is in the actual headphones. Specifically, are the Beats better than Bose? Are they really noise-canceling? Are they worth the clearly inflated price?
Look again at that list of celebs. Most are pop musicians, often from the school of rap. They like a deeper bass, wider middle range and they don’t care so much about the highs. And that’s what these headphones deliver. And, yes, they deliver sound through nicely cushioned speakers covered by the highest-grade plastic and emblazoned with the now-famous lower-case b. [To buy Beats Solo headphones, offered in a rainbow of colors, from Amazon, click here. To buy Beats “Studio” headphones — more expensive, battery powered, made for long distance travelers on planes and trains — click here.]
Beats are the creation of Dr. Dre, the rapper and legendary producer of Eminem’s “Slim Shady,” and Jimmy Iovine, the legendary producer turned music executive.
The creation myth is charming: Dre and Iovine met on a beach.
Dre: “Man, my lawyer wants me to sell sneakers.”
Iovine: “Dre, nobody cares what kind of sneakers you’re wearing, man. Screw sneakers, sell speakers.”
Iovine wasn’t just hyping; music quality is his obsession. “The people we work with spend hundreds of millions of dollars every year getting the sound exactly right,” he says. But this pristine sound is compressed by 20-25% in the CD production process, then compressed again for MP3 delivery. Iovine: “That’s like taking the Beatles master recording and playing it through a portable television.”
That simple ambition “to get the public to hear the music the way it was meant to be heard” has led to millions in sales and an HP computer kitted out for music. A docking station may lie ahead. After that I see clothes with that lower-case emblem.
By then, no doubt, our child will have moved on. But not beyond the Beats headphones. These, it appears, are welded to her head.
