Bose's iPod SoundDock Reviewed

LabRat007 writes "Playlist has a review of the Bose SoundDock, the desktop speaker system for the iPod that Bose has lately been promoting the holy hell out of. The long and the short is that it sounds great--better than any other iPod-specific speaker system--but for $300 is lacking in many features even cheaper setups have, like the ability to actually use the SoundDock as a syncing dock. Oh, and it has no line-in, so you can't use the SoundDock as output for anything else, like a PC or laptop, for instance." It's not quite as cute, but I like my Cambridge Soundworks Model 88 (now superseded by the Model 730) as a laptop loudspeaker system.

Comments

JBL OnStage

[Anonymous Coward]

I stopped by the Mac store to buy the Altec Lansing inMotion speakers after reading a good review of them. They had the the JBL OnStage and it has better bass and nicer controls. The donut shape seems to fill a room better than the flat inMotion speakers. It synchs and charges newer iPods and will accept output from a headphone jack. I'd rate it higher than my Harman Kardon soundsticks and it takes up way less room.

Re:isn't it kind of wasteful?

[ballpoint]

Speakers are the weakest part, by far. The distortion imparted by even top of the line speakers simply dwarfs all the other factors in the audio chain, as long as these are of reasonable quality.

So playing compressed music through an iPod and speakers with quality A is going to sound better than an original CD through speakers with quality B, if A > B.

Of course, if you use a crappy amplifier, loose wires, badly compressed material etc. all bets are off.

Re:Blah.

[DanFrakes]

How well does it reproduce the sound? Ideally, this should be tested with lossless files, because of the well-known distortions introduced by MP3 -- granted that if the encoder is any good, the human ear won't pick them up, but still, the more variables you can take out of the equation, the better. Signal to noise ratio? dBA? How does it compare with an amp hooked up to the line out on the iPod and a set of reasonable quality speakers? Etc. Etc.

Playlist's review process always involves testing audio products with both compressed and uncompressed music files. And as we stated in the review, a similarly priced set of quality sub/sat computer speakers offers better sound. So a decent home stereo will obviously sound better, as well.

Although I appreciate the desire for quantitative information -- I'm as much an audio geek as anyone, personally -- the fact is that none of these small, one-piece speaker systems offers high-end sound. Whether you're talking about the SoundDock, JBL's On Stage or On Tour, Altec Lansing's inMotion models, or any other small, one-piece speaker system, the measured performance would be poor when compared to a good set of hi-fi speakers. (Which is to be expected, given their form factor.) But people aren't buying them for their measurements -- they're buying them for their size, convenience, and design. The demographics buying these systems don't really care, in general, about measurements. They just want to know "how it sounds."