Mark Levinson lends his name to the LG LB3300 - LG’s Rhapsody in Music for audiophiles
By Will Park on Friday, December 7th, 2007 at 2:54 PM PST In Announcements, Devices, LG, Partnerships, Technologies
Wannabe audiophiles will be happy to hear that Mark Levinson has lent his name to the new LG Rhapsody in Music slider phone - known as the LG LB3300 - for the South Korean masses. We say “wannabe” because there no amount of fancy branding or gadgetry that can bring audiophile-quality sound to a handset. But hey, if South Koreans want to think a Mark Levinson-branded phone will give them hi-fi sound quality, let them spend their money. That being said, the LG LB3300 boasts an impressive facade, adorned with an 
LED-backlight touch-sensitive wheel, 1GB of onboard storage (with up to 4GB of expandable memory), 2 megapixel camera, terrestrial DMB, and Bluetooth with A2DP that can steam to two listeners simultaneously.
We like the look of the handset, but we can’t imagine that a fairly run-of-the-mill music-phone it worth the extra Won to be associated with Mark Levinson’s name.
[Via: Engadget Mobile]
Thats a cool product, I like this phone.
If Levinson had any input on the audio output circuit design I’d say this was a good move, but just lending his name to the phone could potentially backfire.
A recent music test in a professional studio tested a SE Walkman phone (K810i?), iPhone and Nokia N81 - the audience (DJs by profession) placed the SE first for sound quality with the Nokia a distant third, and the iPhone was OK but nowhere near as good as the SE phone (or as bad as the Nokia).
It occurred to me that Nokia need to get some serious audio talent working on their N-series phones, similar to what LG may be doing here (unless it is just a branding exercise). Someone like AIR Studios could no doubt give Nokia a hand - they’re world renowned for tuning top end audio kit.
While it’s true that handsets will never be audiophile, it’s clear that some handsets sound significantly better than others, and any handset which is branded as a multimedia handset should not have bad sound quality. Period.
If the manufacturers aren’t up to the job of designing competent audio output circuitry it would be nice to see them calling in the experts - an “AIR Studios” tuned Nokia N-Series handset would be top of my Christmas list!