Introduction

With the ongoing success of Apple's digital media player line of iPods iPod accessories have become a more and more popular option for companies to make a quick buck. Companies that once had no business selling product accessories for consumer electronics are now jumping into the game because of the success of the iPod. With the growing numbers carrying the personal audio device and this growing crop of users wishing to hear their music in more places speaker systems have become an increasingly popular accessory. With the announcement of Apple foray into serious iPod accessories we here at the orbiting headquarters decided to take some of the high-end consumer / low end pro-sumer iPod dockable speaker systems for a spin.

We used the following criteria for determining which units to include in this review:

The (somewhat) willing participants :

Testing Equipment

Methods

Anyone can say something sounds good to them, that doesn't tell you whether or not it's going to sound good to you. We wanted to add to the qualitative opinions floating around some quantitative numbers: numbers can't lie. To come up with our numbers we performed the following test:

Music used in the test

As we said before anyone can say whether or not something sounds good to them and we are anyone. In these tests we take a listen and tell you what our ears think. We used a variety of genres of music to test the units. Music was selected to test response, frequency range and dB levels of reviewed units. We used 1411kpbs, sound sources for testing. The following pieces were primarily used in our testing and conclusions:

Upward and onward!