This is a guest post by Andrew Herrold. Learn more about Andrew here: http://www.aherrold.com/
Tucked away in an unmarked building in the heart of Santa Monica, hip hip icons Dr. Dre, Timbaland, Polow Da Don, chairman of Interscope Geffen A&M Records and Beats co-founder Jimmy Iovine, and product engineers from HP unveiled the HP Envy 15 Beats Limited Edition notebook. Already having contributed to the effort for higher quality sound from digital music with his Beats headphones, Dr. Dre teamed up with Jimmy Iovine, and HP engineers to release a limited edition notebook PC featuring Beats Audio.
Commanding the stage Iovine expressed the team’s deep seated concern for the quality of music in this day and age of cheap ten dollar earbuds and highly compressed media formats. “When Dre and I got together on Beats, it was about an idea which was to improve the transmission of sound between the record makers and the consumers,” said Iovine. “We realized that with the digital revolution, what went terribly wrong was the degradation of sound, which is the heartbeat of music. We found that most PCs downgrade sound to unacceptable levels and when you reduce it further to a limited platform, like an mp3, the music doesn’t stand a chance. If music is an emotion, if it sounds better, then the emotion is better. With HP, we found a partner willing to take the steps to improve the overall sound in the PC and to bring it up to the level that musicians hear in the studio.”
As Iovine and developers went on to discuss specs and performance highlights of this audiophiles dream PC, Dre and Timbaland sat very stoically contributing few words and smiles. However, those few words exuded with their desire to develop new technology to bring back the audio quality we all once knew with vinyl records and analog sound.
The HP ENVY 15 Beats limited edition is expected to be available in the United States on Oct. 22 with a starting price of $2,299.
