I am thrilled to see HTC find a way to differentiate themselves from all the other stale Android makers out there. To the hardcore Android user, you already know about their Sense UI and how it makes HTC stand out, but to the average cell phone user HTC needed something different. In comes Beats by Dr. Dre whose headphones everyone has heard of, and now can give HTC that little different look on the shelves that might boost their consumer focus. Read on for my in depth look.
Behold, the HTC Sensation XE has shown itself to the world. This is the first device HTC has pumped out to show off the new partnership between HTC and Beats. The Sensation was an already powerful high end Android phone that kinda got lost in the crowd of other HTC devices like the Thunderbolt and EVO 3D. As you can see above there is a nice little Beats Audio logo, sporty red highlights, and an above average pair of headphones sitting to the side.
HTC did not stop with what you see above let me tell you what they did not only to hardware, but also software to fulfill the Beats experience.
Hardware
One thing that I loved about HTC is they used to have little red strips of coloring around the earpiece and back of the phone like on the Droid Incredible, but they went away from that. I was so happy to see Beats gave HTC a reason to bring back the red. It gives these phones pop and will help them stick out on the shelves when everything else is either black or white. For this little color deviation I say thank you.
In addition, these new Beats devices will come with one of Beats overpriced headsets. The Sensation XE is boxing the YourBeats in ear headphones, which has a nice aluminum in line volume control. These puppies retail at 89.99 right now, and this is Beats cheapest headset. Great design and quality parts somewhat justify the bump in price. The YourBeats as well as Beats Solo headphones will both take advantage of the added function in the phone, which I will go in depth on in just a moment.
Honestly, I like Beats headphones, but they do lack in sound quality and here is why. I have spent a lot of time customizing car and home audio systems and there is one major difference I find when putting together a system, drivers. Drivers are essentially how many speakers you have separating the sound on each channel. Beats uses just one driver to push all the sound to your ear. This limits the quality because they are trying to tune the speaker to all sound frequencies and not just a specific range. What we will find with beats is that the extreme highs and extreme lows get distorted and probably could be more clear if they would separate with 2 or 3 drivers in a set of headphones like some other companies.
I'm going to show off some tests soon, but before I do I need to explain the software changes that happen as well.
Software
HTC was able to help the Sensation recognise when the Beats Solo or YourBeats headphones are connected. Once you plug-in a nice little headset shows up and a fine tuned EQ is automatically turned on for the Music app. The EQ only works with the Music app, if you have downloaded any other music playing app (Pandora, Winamp, etc) the EQ is disabled and you get the default sound curve. Huge fail for HTC! I'm sure this is a limitation with the Android OS, but really you can't make it universal? Just as a side not you will notice above there is a Disable/Enable toggle button that you can use all the time. So even if you have your own headphones you can enable the Beats EQ.
Quality
One of Beats claims is that there approved devices will give you audio like the creator intended it to be. AMS Acoustics tested the Sensation XE with the YourBeats headphones as well as other headsets to let us know what Beats does to make it sound more authentic on their products. HTC has tweaked the software in the phone so you can turn on a finely tuned EQ setting that will make the audio sound better. This will automatically turn on when the YourBeats and Studio headsets are connected, but for other headsets you have to use manually. Is there a benefit to the enhanced EQ? Well, below there is the SPL curve that shows off the purity of the sound being transferred to the headset.
This graph is showing how much sound gets lost when the EQ gets turned off represented by the black line. Is it a lot, no not really. The arrows are showing where the sound gets enhanced when the EQ is on. These frequencies are around 40, 2K, and 10K frequencies. Basically 40 is the really low hitting base, 2K is mid to high think Celine Dion, and 10K is ultra high usually artificially made or maybe a high hat (If you're over 40 you probably can't even hear it). What does this mean? Not much, the little crank up at the low frequency might help if you have a headset that can handle it. Most of the in-ear headphones we use with phones can't really handle that frequency anyway, but the Beats headsets just barely benefit.
Above is an interesting graph allowing us to see where the volume gets boosted. This shows the EQ for the YourBeats headphones (red line), Solo headphone (grey line at bottom), and two other headphones that do not get recognized by the phone as Beats headsets. What we learn is that HTC and Beats have fine tuned the EQ for the Beats headsets. The YourBeats headphone gets a huge boost for the high end frequencies and they extend the bass curve, probably because it has such a small driver it can't handle the extremely low frequencies well, so they tried to expand the curve. For the Solos which use a much bigger driver they did not need to extend the lows and they kicked down the trouble a lot. I would guess the highs were coming in far too loud during testing on the Solos. The two non-Beats headphones had pretty much the same curve.
By these tests we can see that the software in the phone was tweaked very nicely to enhance the sound experience for the Beats headphones. So out of the box you get a great experience. However, there a plenty of EQ apps out there in the Android market that you can customize yourself to better your experience. So the Beats experience doesn't really create a better sound, it just makes things more convenient and hooks you into using their products.
Final Thoughts
I love what HTC has done to bring the average consumer a great looking device with a great audio experience. To experts, you can create a better audio experience yourself. In fact, I really don't like the fact Beats EQ is only available in the stock Music app (So if your streaming Pandora you get a flat EQ). I also don't like the EQ wasn't tuned for more Beats headphones. But, I love the use of color in the hardware and that I get a quality set of headphones. HTC has found a great way to make their devices look better on the shelf.
I will leave you with what HTC plans to do with their next Verizon LTE phone leaked recently on Android Central, known as the HTC Rezound.
What a great Christmas treat
