14 DAY TRIAL // Apple has hired digital audio veteran Peter Eastty to help with the company’s vision of the future of audio, according to the new staffer’s LinkedIn profile. After the acquisition of Beats Electronics, Apple may now want to merge its new talents and churn out an awesome new pair of headphones.
Listed as Director SoC Audio Processing at Apple, Eastty says, “I’ve worked in the application of digital and computer technology to audio since I graduated from college and I still find the problems fascinating as well as the answers.”
New headphones on the way?
After the Beats acquisition a few months ago, the media immediately speculated that Apple was getting into the audio business. Not just the music streaming bit, but the part that involves actual speakers as well.
That dream is still alive and kicking in some people’s heads, and we wouldn’t be telling the truth if we said we were any different. Now that Apple has taken aboard a true veteran in the industry, it’s hard not to resurrect those 24-bit audio rumors once again.
Eastty appears to have a company of his own bearing his own name. On peter-eastty.com, a brief description of the company’s activity is offered.
“Peter Eastty Limited has a history in digital audio and signal processing spanning 45 years. We've designed spectrum analysers, digital music analysers and synthesizers, graphics processors, human interface devices, distributed software applications, mainframe computer hardware, micro-processor systems, auto-routers, radio frequency hardware and software, digital audio processors and programming environments, audio processing algorithms, digital filters, graphical user interfaces, encryption and decryption processors and programs, audio networks and the audio processors and processing inside cell phones, tablets and PCs.”
If someone’s prepared to handle Apple’s demands, it’s Eastty.
What about the iPod?
Just because Apple killed the iPod classic, that doesn’t mean it wants to kill the entire iPod line. Sure, the company has a habit of putting any declining business to sleep once it no longer produces enough revenue to justify the trouble of sourcing parts and manpower overseas, but who’s to say Apple doesn’t want to reignite sales this time around?
Once its most popular product line, the iPod could easily take off once again by shipping with a pair of genuinely new headphones that do what no other headphones have done before. Whatever Apple decides it to be. We wouldn’t be surprised to see the iPod line completely revamped in Spring 2015, along with new headphones.