My HTC Sensation has it built in and came with Beats Audio headphones.
I’ve looked into this a bit. I’ve got the non-XE Sensation, turns out that the ‘Beats Audio Profile’ is just a bit of software, there’s no physical difference between the two phones at all (other than a funky coloured case on the XE). There’s a few other bits and pieces to it but nothing earth-shattering, it’s mostly marketing dribble; earthing the headphone socket and suchlike.
Because it’s just software, I’ve been able to flash my phone to turn it into an XE with Beats Audio. There’s a couple of things it does.
The first is, it boosts bass and vocal frequencies, and boosts overall volume. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, especially if you listen to music that advocates fornicating the pigs and popping a cap in someone’s ass yo, and it’s not hard to see how enabling Beats appears to make music suddenly sound ‘better’. If I played you the same track twice, but on the second playthrough I’d turned it up a bit, you’d probably tell me it sounded better second time around. The boosts are supposedly what the good Doctor thinks sounds good.
The interesting thing here is, it’s nothing particularly clever. Essentially, it’s just a preset graphic equaliser setting as far as I can tell. There may be some sort of dynamic element to it where it adjusts it on the fly based on the frequencies in the song you’re listening to, I’ve not been able to find out for sure, but nonetheless it’s nothing that you couldn’t do yourself without the Beats Audio Profile present. And arguably, you should; do you want to listen to music that sounds good to your ears, or to someone else’s?
The second thing is that it apparently can detect the presence of a pair of Dre headphones, and will adjust the sound accordingly to match. Again, this is nothing clever, it’s just fiddled EQ settings, and whilst there’s a compelling argument for having ‘matched’ settings for your headphones it’s nothing you couldn’t do yourself with a bit of playing with settings.
As an aside, I can’t help wonder if it adds more of a boost with Dre headphones so that they sound ‘better’ in comparison tests with other headphones.
