Beats President Luke Wood, who runs the audio products side of the business, told Mashable that the acquisition was a great fit because the company shared DNA with Apple.
He said that the early days of low-quality digital music resulted in a ‘lost generation’ for premium audio, but that we now live in a very different world …
We’re looking at our little audio slice of the world and trying to focus on creating a stellar product experience. I think that’s also the fundamental DNA of everything Steve wanted to accomplish at Apple. By product experience, that includes ID, design, technology, innovation, simplicity. Those are always things that have been fundamental to our DNA, too.
Unsurprisingly, Mashable‘s Ariel Bogle pressed him on the description of Beats products as ‘premium audio,’ and unsurprisingly Woods defended the company’s record.
Where it started to become a chronic issue was in the early 2000s during the height of file sharing and torrents and compressed audio. Suddenly, people were able to stream things off their laptop, and we lost a generation to the degradation of audio. Now people are getting it, getting addicted to it, and you never go back.
Beats headphones, he argued, filled that gap – though he said he was “probably prouder” of the Studio 2.0. You can check out Zac Hall’s review of the Studio Wireless here.
We came out with the first Beats’ headphones to address a specific problem: No one was tuning headphones to replicate the excitement of modern albums. Music has significantly changed because of digital recording. The advent of sampling, for example, or the advent of digital synthesisers. The creation of sub-amplifiers too, it’s a technological innovation that lets you hear the bottom end [of music] in a different way.
Read the full interview over at Mashable UK.
