Apple is close to striking a deal with Dr. Dre.
In what would be the largest-ever purchase by the iPhone maker, Apple is in advanced talks to acquire headphone maker and music-streaming service Beats Electronics LLC for $3.2 billion, people with knowledge of the matter said.
It’s been corroborated by just about any major news outlet, so it has merit. I’m in no way an Apple expert, but this acquisition seems completely random and weird. Beats is essentially the Monster of headphones.
Well Apple is the Monster of Tech world, I mean as in Monster cable.
haha yeah right. because monster leads customer satisfaction ratings and resale value? nope. everyone knows that’s a scam. you know who has monster cables in studios? people recording on PC’s. mac people are smarter than that, holmes.
too easy of a slam for you to pass up, right? you wish apple was just like monster. that’s your narrative, i get it.
but you got it backwards – android and pc makers are the monster of tech – shipping largely the same thing as 100 other makers and doing everything they can to dress it up as new and exciting and better than the others. monster never makes anything new, no one ever copies them. they are fancy boxes and fancy colors and fancy promises. all marketing. nothing like apple.
Seriously, you need to be more defensive
Seriously? Your argument is weak and easy to crush.
Keep thinking an Apple is the same as cheap crap, just in a prettier box. I’ve been seeing this online for 20 years, I wouldn’t be surprised to see you post your “switcher” article one day.
Monster is a scam because speaker cables make no difference. Blind hearing tests have shown that coat hanger wire works just as well as the most expensive speaker cables on the market.
Funny. We (rightfully so, imho) accuse Samsung of having little to no taste, but this move by Apple, if true, takes tastelessness to whole new levels.
Suing companies for stealing your ideas when you have used millions of other peoples ideas for your product can’t be beat for tastelessness.
Were you talking about Apple or Samsung? They both steal other peoples ideas and use them in products.
It doesn’t matter. Ideas are not owned. I have a lot of ideas and some of them are even really good but I would feel dirty for asking money for them. Now if you want to hire me to work on the idea that would be great and if you would like to profit from future ideas I might have you could hire me full time so you can claim everything I think of in my contract. But if your company makes a product and a competitor makes a similar product without copying the exact methods or techniques… You only had an idea. They still had to put in the work to develop the product so you have no claim to their work.
You’re talking about class, not taste. It’s already common fact that all multinational tech companies have no class.
The Beats effect combined to the Apple effect would produce exponentially higher prices.
$600 headphones were not enough? Now buy a new iBeats headphone and get a gold-plated iPhone 5S for free.
Kochise
There are plenty of more expensive headphones than what Beats offers. The difference is that those others have high quality. Apple is a bit like those others as a computer manufacturer: sure, their products are over-priced, but they’re not (much) more overpriced than products of similar quality.
It’s easier to see now that everyone and his dog is trying to make Apple-like products. You can get cheaper laptops with better performance than a MacBook Air, but you can’t get MacBook Air-like laptops without paying MacBook Air prices. Of course, you can still get a good laptop at a lower price, it just won’t look as nice, feel as rigid, and last as long on the battery.
At the cost of Beats headphones, you can either buy quality, OR you can buy Beats. You can’t have both.
The article says the acquisition is mainly for Beats’ Spotify-like music streaming service. (It seems to be US-only?)
Yes, of course, it’s all about the streaming service (so just another customer-base aquisition.)
Nothing else.
Edited 2014-05-09 10:09 UTC
So, you mean utterly overrated, overhyped and overpriced?
Exactly. As an amateur musician I value accuracy over loudness and range tweaking, and that’s all Beats (the headphones or the EQ tech in Beats phones) offers. They boost the bass and treble frequencies to the point of distortion, and the midrange ends up so muddy you can’t distinguish some instruments anymore. I’ve had $50 Sony headphones that far outperform $300 Beats junk when it comes to accuracy and lack of distortion. That’s to say nothing of really great studio headphones by Sennheiser.
Thats about how I’d describe Monster and Beats.
Taking advantage of people who don’t know any better.
Overrated, overhyped, and overpriced. Trendy. Easy buy.
Status ignoramus. Someone who refuses to do their homework.
I wish Apple would have thrown in with a real audio company like TC or Audio Technica or AKG or Focusrite or Aphex, not this flavor of the month.
But as a Pono buyer/investor this could be good – it could be a sign that Apple will stay out of HD/pro audio and stick with the plastic consumer stuff, leaving the middle of the market to Sony and Pono.
No-no-no please no! When Apple buys some company, its regular operations are shut down and the only thing remaining is some of the underlying tech and possibly engineers. Just a few examples:
– Siri got integrated into iOS with zero chance of making their tech available to other platforms
– Authentec who used to provide all sorts of fingerprint scanners and useful goodies for companies like HP and Dell was basically reduced to support only the Touch ID sensor in iPhone 5s.
Having AKG or Sennheiser reduced to a manufacturer of white earbuds with the Apple logo would be a sad day for many.
I agree, I didn’t mean Apple should buy a company like that, I’d rather see them outsource some of their audio decisions to a company that knows audio. If the new stock headphones with iPhone 6 were designed by Sennheiser
I don’t think those types of audio companies would just adjust the EQ and slap their logo on any old crap. I’m worried that Apple will logo everything audio as “Beats” and that doesn’t really mean anything other than hype and hyped EQ.
I worry further that this marketing combo of Apple and Beats will keep the mp3 standard around for more painful years, and this does nothing to move us past the redbook 16 bit standard, unless they use this Beats brand move to also move to 24bit and discreet amps. But I doubt it.
Although Monster may be overpriced and hyped, they at least don’t make the music sound worse. Beats headphones on the other hand actually sound worse than headphones that cost much less. Monster cable is not going to sound worse than $10 speaker wire I buy at Walmart.
..if mainstream media runs with it, it *must* be true!
People used to use Apple’s white earphones, then they went out of fashion.
Now they all wear Beats.
I am no Apple fan but I doubt Steve Jobs would have ever made this deal. I don’t see how this is good for Apple. I guess if you are a company that has more money than you know what to do with…
I doubt Steve Jobs spins, after all, he is… iMortal.
Kochise
http://www.innerfidelity.com/content/celebrity-headphone-deathmatch…
OK, I stay with my AKG K4. Still going strong 🙂
Greetings,
pica
Most of us who work on audio and with professional equipment can easily tell how bad consumer hardware is in general, but the Beats stuff is just terrible.
People buy them only and exclusively by the looks, because other than that the high frequencies are non-existent and the transients are muddy (typical of when audio is fed through a cheap booster and dephases).
Yep, but
“there is good and bad in everyone” [I am sure you who I cite]
A month ago I listened to professional JBL speakers and the singers sounded as they were lisping. Never heard that before listining to professional JBL speakers. But maybe is was just the amp clipping.
Greetings,
pica
Someone who speaks my language. I didn’t think anyone here was in the same field. Honestly, I’m less annoyed by consumer-grade junk and more annoyed by self-proclaimed “audiophiles” and their `prosumer`-grade junk. I’ve come across very few who truly know what they’re talking about. There’s nothing worse than someone insisting they’re a (near-)expert, but too dumb to realize the claim couldn’t be further from the truth.
At the very moment I listen to my
* NAD C 525BEE
* NAD C 325BEE
* Elac 310 Jet
combo, an all consumer equipment combo.
I do not miss high frequencies. The ELAC 310 Jet speakers in my opinion transmit high frequencies better the for example my JBL Control 1 Xtreme which is a professional speaker.
pica
Edited 2014-05-09 15:11 UTC
but my reference will remain unplugged (with no amps or speakers involved, an symphony orchestra for example) live music and I will remain measure quality of music equipment only by this reference. Wether it is consumer or professional equipment does not matter for me.
pica
Edited 2014-05-09 15:38 UTC
Pica – I get kicked off tech sites when I start to talk about Audio quality!
Something about digital nerds – they get really offended if you tell them they are settling for less in this modern age of consumption.
They don’t understand why high quality recorded audio has been slowly removed from society over the last 30 years. They don’t believe in conspiracy theories, nor can most of them understand even the basics of audio or DSP.
But you are totally right, and righteous, and I’ll protect your point forever — Live music, using your ears to hear a person or people play an instrument is the highest quality audio available. Our ears have unlimited resolution, and when you add the 5 million hair cells on our body to what our ears and auditory cortex is capable of, you have an extremely impressive system.
Digital babies tend to think things are always better now. In the world of audio this is not the case. We are using Xerox copies, paint thinner, and tons of artificial sweetener these days. Any wonder the resulting music is practically poisonous.
Live sound using your ears is always the best.
Next would be a well recorded analog recording, but these are harder and harder to make since analog production is such a dead field.
Next would be digital at 24/48 or higher.
Anything below that is stripping, lightening, thinning out, removing important data from music. Using the “science” of perception they have been able to get away with removing so much from our music since the 80’s.
Uh, what? Where have you heard such rubbish? I’m not even going to go to the rest of your comment as this single quote here already manages to rob the carpet from under your feet.
what’s wrong, can’t hear?
you know where i stand on this – modern science falls down hard explaining what animals, musicians and even computer nerds can accomplish with their ears and their human senses. you can’t measure it properly, you can’t define it, so you can’t accurately recreate it digitally. sorry.
my point is that our auditory system has no “resolution” because it’s very analog – electrical, pressure based, chemical, and emotional.
digital babies like to think things are better now and science has answered everything. sorry for your digital illusions. let someone with way more credentials than I explain science:
“The whole point of science is that most of it is uncertain. That’s why science is exciting–because we don’t know. Science is all about things we don’t understand. The public, of course, imagines science is just a set of facts. But it’s not. Science is a process of exploring, which is always partial. We explore, and we find out things that we understand. We find out things we thought we understood were wrong. That’s how it makes progress.†– Freeman Dyson, Mathematical Physicist
So allow me to re-frame this.
There’s over 5 million hairs on the human body. Each has a nerve receptor which reports pressure and wind changes to the auditory cortex. Put that in your digital spec.
Inside of the ear, after the eardrum and the natural amplification of the middle ear you have the ossicles bones. These are the smallest bones in the human body. Why bone? Accuracy.
Move into the inner ear and you get to the tectoral membrane. Look up “Place Theory” on the tectoral membrane to consider our natural amplification and limiting abilities.
Then look into the organ of corti, the so-called microphone of the body, to determine how it is we can detect amazingly fine changes in pitch, harmonics, and timbre using the 20,000 hair cells spiraling down the organ of corti in the cochlea.
remember this entire area is surrounded by our various emotional processing centers. so, ya know, we are really feeling all of this. it is survival, you couldn’t survive predators or hunt yourself without auditory.
Finally, remember the perfect stereo placement, the ability to constantly alter the head orientation and the pressure inside of the ears, and this all has to be in real-time, nature don’t have any sync issues. If your digital spec had all of that then maybe it nears an accurate reproduction of a natural phenomena.
No amount of bad science will alter my views. I can easily hear digital degradation of audio at 16/44 yes, 16/48 yes, 24/44 usually, 24/48 or higher, sometimes. The real limiter in digital is the 16 bit data space, not the 22k freq range.
Anyone that can’t hear a difference either doesn’t care or has their head in the sand. You keyboard jockies with your mp3s and xiph links are the real scourge of the audio field. But then again most of you aren’t in that field.
Edited 2014-05-09 19:40 UTC
Yes, our ears are damn good, but physics limits them. The product of frequency bandwidth and frequency resolution is limited by the heat induced noise. Our ears operate at 36°C (or 100°F) and operate hard at the heat induced noise limit. That is why, when you have flu you have noise in your ears.
Yes, live music is the original and as such suffers no recording, mixing, mastering induced quality loss. Live music is not only played in concert halls. Here in Germany where I live it is also played as street music. But if one has its phones always on, how can that person hear the live music?
pica
But the biggest quality loss is induced by microphones and the speakers. The mechanical parts in the chain.
Well build (new) class A or class D amplifiers do well. Also good AD and DA converters. Digital mixing and mastering is arithmetics and if the number of bits is sufficient these also do not induce much quality loss.
pica
This is assuming equal source, yes, the speakers/mics alter the sound the most.
The thing is, outside of the lab, none of us have equal source. We listen to all sorts of garbage source these days, whether we choose to or not.
How many people in the world sold their vinyl to buy CDs, then sold their CDs to rip MP3s, and now listen to streaming at even lower bitrates all day? This is 3-4 willful degradations of quality for convenience.
It’s kinda depressing that you have to go back in time to get better sound.
I do think that the “mic” of the body and the “speaker” of the body/instruments are both far more advanced than their electrical counterparts so arguing about specs misses the point — go hear or make live music as often as possible.
But i think if digital upped it’s standards (320k mp3 minimum for streaming and 24/48 minimum for masters) we’d have a happier planet. this stripped out audio we are feeding ourselves is like a mcdonalds diet.
Well, your NAD stuff is quite good. It may be on a consumer lever price wise but your choice shows that you do think about sound a bit and not just set up a cheap boom box satellite subwoofer system.
my own definition is not price based. Professional audio equipment for me is audio equipment intended to earn money with. That could be
* recording studio equipment
* mobile recording equipment
* DJ equipment
but also
* audio systems for museums, exhibition halls, …
* audio systems for market halls
* audio systems for airport halls
* audio systems for outside use
– bus stations
– train stations
– stadiums
pica
Edited 2014-05-10 10:39 UTC
I agree especially given that sound playback is partly subjective.
However Beats are really poor quality. Go listen to that pillbox in the store, it’s laughably bad.
But Dr. Dre hit the marketing dead on. He has everyone who listens to hip hop thinking they MUST have beats.
Yeah I agree 100%: audiophiles deserve their reputation.
Dre voids the purchase agreement by breaching conditions of non-disclosure which would allow Apple to announce the purchase at WWDC. Apple walks away from the purchase and negotiates a new deal for half the current price.
I thought this too. Anytime Apple is going to do something and their partner speaks first, things go badly.
Could it be that Dr. Dre just went gangsta and made his own rules, or will his facebook sharing cost his company big?
Either way, I don’t think I’ll be buying Beats headphones. I’m worried Apple will find some way to make them even more overpriced.
Beats Electronics doesn’t just make headphones. They have their stuff in computers, cars, and cellphones as well. All areas where I’m sure Apple would love to expand.
But what is “their stuff” ? Not snarking, just wondering, does anyone even know what tech Beats has besides a graphic EQ heavy on the left?
Electrolytes.
It’s got what teens crave.
I agree that there is a little bit of MonsterCable in Beats, in that they charge a premium for questionable quality improvements, and lots of marketing.
Beats are the cool modern headphones to have, and they do their best with the crappy source most people play through them. I don’t see any evidence that they are any better than existing name brands like AudioTechnica, Sennheiser, AKG but they come in stylish colors, and artificially bump the bass for todays ADHD music.
So on that front – this looks bad. Apple is following it’s worst instincts and buying something for popularity, something they can control and crush. I’d rather them buy a company more known for quality than trendiness.
On the other hand – Apple buying anything Audio is big news, since they are so dominant in the gadget and mobile space. If Apple owns Beats and keeps pushing headphones, you’d think they’d up the quality of their players to compete with the HD players like Fiio, Sony Walkman, and Ponoplayer.
Hard to know if they are buying it for the headphone biz, the brand name, or the new streaming service. I haven’t used it. Time will tell what Apple really wanted here.
There’s also demographics at play here – Apple still has customers to get (or get back), and many of them are under 25 and live in their Beats headphones. I wonder if this is the first minority owned business Apple has purchased? It’s definitely the first minority-marketed business they’ve been involved with.
There are actually two bad elements to Beats audio. The headphones are $30 plastic pieces of crap with oversized drivers being sold at ten times the value, and the Beats EQ software in phones tweaks the bass and treble and muddies up the midrange, no matter how good the headphones used to listen to it are.
Another thing I noticed from owning an HTC One with Beats: Somehow they managed to utterly destroy the audio quality coming out of the device when you turn off the Beats enhancements. I played the same MP3 through my own very nice headphones on the HTC One with Beats off and on, and then through my old HTC Arrive. The Arrive sounded better by far than with Beats turned off on the HTC One, and much closer to my studio monitors. With Beats on it was somewhat bearable, but it was still far from accurate output.
😉
just looking at the transmission diagrams of these monsters, that would sound quite interesting on phones with linear frequency response.
pica
Remember that Apple is entering to the automobile industry, I think this is mostly to use in cars, people demand good speakers for their cars.
People who are seriously into stereo and quality listening often spend about 150 Euro for good headphones for the stereo system at home. Other my spend more. Imagine young people spending 150 Euro for crappy headphones to listen to crappy music in MP3 quality.
Beats have a great line from a marketing perspective but underneath they are just cheap speakers with the bass turned up.
Beats also has a subscription service but that is not something Apple needs to pay billions for.
This smells like a pals deal and doesn’t inspire confidence in Cook.
I also wanted to say that I have no problem with Beats or Monster type products. High margin products often depend on the uninformed (especially if it involves image-first brands) and I don’t pity anyone that can’t bother spending 5 minutes on the internet reading reviews.
i’m in full agreement with you at this point. Seems strange and/or misguided.
Also comes at the time I’m defending apple about being marketers only. The only thing Beats has going for it is Dr. Dre’s name on it, and Apple doesn’t need Dr. Dre’s approval.
Apple is so secretive, we will have to wait a few months or years to understand why they bought them. When they bought Logic and killed the PC version it was confusing at first, but then GarageBand showed up, then the Macbook Air, and then the iOS audio revolution kicked off and no one’s crying about running logic on a PC anymore.
I just want my HD audio player so I can get away from mp3 but stay digital properly , (waiting for the yellow pono), and I really hope the internet as a whole gets around to moving the streaming standard to 320k .
…..not blow $3+ billion to purchase overpriced headphones.
I think Apple is by no means a cheap brand, they don’t go for the most expensive or cutting edge hardware but they do tend to go for the most expensive design … save for the crappy headphones, but they seem to be trying to change that, by replacing their infamously cheap headphones to a well established and over-hyped headphone brand… over-hyped phone and over-hyped and overpriced headphone … nothing strange here, its like they’re meant for each other, the majority of the apple customer base and the rest of the people that understand nothing about audio quality will love it!
I think Apple may make Beats compatible with Apple hardware only (changing the jack/connector on the headphones and dropping Beats licences to other manufacturers. So if you want to use Beats you will have to buy an Apple phone.
Since Apple offers a selection of headphones on their own site, and my own range of decent quality cans (Sennheiser HD518 and KEF M500) work great with my iPhone, iPad and the Audioengine DAC from my Mac Mini, I don’t think Apple would have much interest in limiting connectivity choices for its customers. I do agree with others here that Beats headphones look better than they sound….these days, I really like those KEF headphones on the train to work!
It all makes sense now:
http://www.monoandstereo.com/2014/04/samsung-level-premium-headphon…
At the end of the day, it’s still the consumer that loses. Instead of one giant corporation selling crap head-fi, we’ll have two.
The kids will buy tham in droves thanks to marketing – Apple/Beats have bling-bling MTV hip-hop, while Samsung have aneurysm inducing K-poop stars – we’ll have an entire generation of people raised on the wrong type of frequency response.
We have well over a generation of people that already think that 16/44 redbook is “better” than anything that came before and that it is the gold standard that we can then apply lossy compression to.
The people that have been saying that 16/44 removes some of our music (the soul?) since the early 80’s were outnumbered by the people who loved the shininess of the CD.
When internet audio started up, they used CD as their standard to reduce even further. So now we have formats that are 2x degraded and a bunch of people under 30 running around totally clueless as to what real music sounds like, what real instruments sound like when recorded, what high fidelity actually sounds like.
Is there any other tech area where the standard of quality has been reduced with every new standard?
Not that I’m aware of. Graphics has seen exactly the opposite! Modern GPU’s are engineering marvels. Every day something new comes out, thousands of man-hours are poured into creating robust software support to make incredible effects possible. Real-time ray-tracing like Global Illumination is now a feasible possibility in the near future. Never in a million years would scientists think 20 years ago this would become a reality.
Yet with audio, it’s been stagnant, and as you correctly point out, even been going downhill! It still amazes me how some people just_can’t_tell_the_difference between a good and bad recording (source) or headphone (equipment). I don’t know what it is with audio that most people just don’t get it. I guess visually a person can immediately see a difference (whether something improved or not), and with audio being something that is somewhat subjective, most people are unable to tell the difference, because they don’t have a reference to compare to.
I just hope that with this acquisition, Apple can wise up and use the engineers to truly ENGINEER a great headphone (and really compete with Sony, Sennheiser, Beyerdynamic, AKG, Fostex etc.) instead of pumping out crappy hardware with just their logo plastered on top.
Edited 2014-05-13 13:39 UTC