This took Dr. Dre to the length and breadth of audiophile superstardom when his name was used for a branded series of headphones by Monster, simply dubbed "Beats by Dre." This warranted an overblown design, a jaw dropping price and, to take 'Steve Jobs' terminology, a reality distortion field surrounding these bass-heavy headphones being the best sound quality that money can buy. Although these could also be the unquestionable demise of the high-end headphone market.

Here is where the conspiracy begins.

Quoting from Dre himself:

People aren’t hearing all the music. Artists and producers work hard in the studio perfecting their sound. But people can’t really hear it with normal headphones. Most headphones can’t handle the bass, the detail, the dynamics. Bottom line, the music doesn’t move you. With Beats, people are going to hear what the artists hear, and listen to the music the way they should: the way I do.

Just a quick, picky thing: you won't hear 'what the artists hear,' as they'll be embracing the uncompressed version on the recording desk, which when mixed together (before mastering) will give a far superior sound before being turned into whichever form of digitally compressed file you take your music nowadays. So Beats or no Beats, this is technically incorrect.

The frequency response of their original (and most promoted) headphones, the 'Studio,' is what you'd expect from most headphones of this size on the market: 20-20,000Hz; but with the use of 'advanced materials' to deliver undistorted highs and rich lows. They have a 115db dynamic range, and a respectable (but not the biggest) 40mm driver size. Of course, this maybe all good quantitative statistics. However, we must also focus on the qualitative, because audio is something much more of a finely-tuned judgement, the same way that pixels don't necessarily define the quality of a camera's photograph. The sum of its parts.