Introduction

When Apple's big announcement a few weeks back turned out to be an upgraded Mac mini and a 21st century ghetto blaster many were disappointed, myself included. "Fun new products", in my mind entailed something, oh I don't know - fun? Sure, the new products were shiny and had Apple logos on them, but it's been years since that was the deciding factor for my purchases.

After hearing rumblings of how inadequate the iPod Hi-Fi specifications and feature sets were and inversely how glowing the reviews were we decided to take it for a spin ourselves. I also used this review as an excuse to buy my first iPod, a Nano 1GB — I'm no prognosticator but I think Apple might have something in the iPod line.

• 2x 80mm speakers
• 1x 130mm woofer
• Frequency response: 53Hz to 16kHz ± 3 dB
• Maximum peak sound pressure level: 108 dB at 1 m (AC); 102 dB at 1 m (DC)
• 6.6 x 17 x 6.9" enclosure
• 14.5lbs without batteries 16.7lbs with batteries
• Wireless Infared Remote

In the Box

When you open the box you are immediately greeted by a large black box with the words "Designed by Apple in California" scrolled across it in white print, if you never have bought an Apple product the packaging really is nothing short of elegant. Inside this box lies two smaller black boxes, kind of like an Apple branded Russian nesting doll. Inside the first box is your lifetime supply of iPod dock adaptors with just about every adaptor you could ever want - with the exception of the Nano and the Video iPods.

With these dock connectors I could feed a small country

Also in this box is the Apple remote and all literature pertaining to the Hi-Fi, none of which I read — after all directions are for suckers. In the other box is where you find the power-cable for the unit (the power supply is internal) along with the Nano and iPod Video adapters. I found it odd that the dock adapters for the newest iPods weren't present in the other box where earlier generations were displayed nicely, leading me to believe that this project might have been a long time coming, or there was just no room in the other box. After the original new Apple smell wore off of the packaging I got down to the Hi-Fi.

Out of the Box

Despite my comments on being surprised with the units size before the only way this thing is going up on your shoulder is with a small crane. This is portable in the same sense that you could bring a Playstation to the beach, hook it up to a small LCD and a car battery and play for about an hour. You aren't going to haul this thing around, but some people cary the original Nintendo DS around with them, so I could be wrong.

Here I hope to somehow breed the two boxes to make some sort of gigantic home entertainment system.

The styling of the unit is very Apple, surprising since it is made by Apple. It has the white iBook, iPod (insert white Apple product here) shine to it. As we know glossy white is cool until you actually use it - at which point you realize just how dirty the surrounding environment is and you decide to spend your remaining years living in some sort of hyperbolic bubble. Once I put the unit down on my carpet dirt molecules seemed to be magnetically attracted to the white surface making me cry a deluge of dry tears. The speaker grill that comes with the unit attaches to the front, covering the speakers by pushing some pegs into holes, it is simple and yet totally ineffective. I tried several times to get the damn thing to stay in, listening for some sort of audible click with out any results. I finally came to the conclusion that you just can't touch the grill after putting it on unless you want it to fall back off in some sort of Infinite Loop of grill attaching. The unit has two handles on either side of the unit, for ease of hernia acquisition, that are strong and sturdy but not molded out of the same piece as the cabinet. Remember: bend at the knees.

The Hi-Fi has a grand total of two buttons on it. A volume up and volume down, unfortunately the Hi-Fi's volume is not independent of the iPod but instead controls the connected iPods volume. The buttons themselves, although slightly recessed, are touch sensitive and have no real user feedback unless the iPod is present.

One button, two button - don't get confused!

The accompanying remote, which uses IR so you are limited to line of site, can be used to poorly control many of the iPods features. If you hope to navigate through menus using the remote, think again — I found it all but impossible to do effectively. Since the screen on the current generations of the iPod aren't very useful, from any sort of distance, to get visual feedback after the remote buttons are pressed Apple, luckily, included a set of LEDs on the front of the unit that give you visual feed back when a remote button is pushed. The LED either lights up green or orange for command received and done, or command received and there is a problem. While the iPod is playing I only get the orange LED when attempting to press the menu button on the remote. What would be ideal is if the unit had video out so it could be hooked up to a larger display, read TV, so one can navigate menus from afar. Although the functionality for reaching all of the iPods features are questionable the design of the remote is very good. Using this remote in the dark is a pleasure, it's almost impossible to hit the wrong button when trying to turn the volume up or switching tracks.

On the back of the unit there is a plug for the power adapter and an analog/digital optical jack presumably for connecting your Air Port Express but a jack that would work with just about any component. This jack does not work while your iPod is connected to the Hi-Fi, for some this could be a gigantic pain. Perhaps the most comical of the Hi-Fi's visible features is the compartment for six 'D cell' batteries, I'm not sure what I'm going to use to power my Casio portable keyboard now but the batteries were for a good cause.

Qualitative Performance

Someone once said that opinions are like rabbits: everyone has one and they make babies at an alarming rate, or something. This is my least favorite part of the review process, I have to listen and tell you, the reader, whether or not these units sound good using vague non-descript words and ears that don't belong to you. The driving factors in doing this review were the numerous reviews popping up saying how great the performance of the unit was without any real kind of numbers, just opinions. I think that Ars readers are a different breed, would you buy a video card without seeing some benchmarks? Going just on someone saying, "it feels really quick"? Of course not.

That being said here is the part where I tell you the Hi-Fi feels pretty quick. Please remember your experiences may vary, please check the hard numbers after you read this as they were the real reason for this review.

We used uncompressed audio played through our iPod into our iPod Hi-Fi. I'm going to start out by telling you my conclusion: the Hi-Fi sounds pretty good. The box performs and performs pretty well. Descriptions of the unit filling up a room with sound are not exaggerated, it definitely puts out a full sound. The Hi-Fi, despite being an all in one unit does a fairly decent job of projecting a stereo image and separating the left and right channels. The speakers are somewhat on the rich side of things, as all of these are, sometimes this richness can take away from the vocalists and the ability to understand lyrics and everything kind of muddles together. With the Hip-Hop EQ of the iPod the bass of the unit can be a bit unresponsive leaving the lower frequency response leaving something to be desired. The middle frequencies seemed a bit hyped especially during "Green Dolphin Street" as performed by Joe Pass and Prelude 1 of the Bach Cello Suites. I was quite impressed when I listened to "Lyrical Gangbang" when, for the first time, I heard the bongo track in the background, when I hear things that I haven't before I consider that a positive for the speakers in question. The stereo separation during "Such Great Heights" was good considering the unit is an all in one and the synth bell part sounded excellent, but this could just be a case where for once the hyped middle frequencies were a good thing instead of a bad thing. The organ bass in the Soulive track was somewhat muddled but that is to be expected from a unit without a dedicated subwoofer and organ bass. The crash cymbal response also left a little something to be desired. During Victor Whooten's bass solo there was some noticeable vibrating occurred in the low end in both the iM7 and the Hi-Fi but not the iFi making me think that the smaller units woofers just couldn't handle the low sustained frequencies. With the EQ off it seemed as though the mids and high-lows were hyped especially on "Thank You" and "The Old Castle" and overall seemed a bit thumpy. All that being said this unit sounds good. Now be warned for many of you this sounds good in the same way that some people might think a Bose Wave Radio might sound good, and we all know there is a lot of hate for Bose out there.

Quantitative Performance

Now on to the good stuff, the hard numbers. In this instance given the testing environment and the tools used it might be a little more like hard-rubbery numbers, none the less. First a bit of a refresher on basic speaker principles for everyone. In an ideal world we want any recording we are listening to to sound exactly like it would if the musicians were in the same room as you. We would like a flat response along the entire line of the frequency spectrum. Hype, in this case, is to be believed and is indeed a bad thing. Hyped, or exaggerated, frequencies might sound good for some styles of music but when applied to other types of music it might make the music sound undesirable. Later if you want to play with levels of different frequencies you can play with your EQ, but for all intensive purposes we want speakers to be flat. A performance from a cello with a little hyped bass might add a little something to the overall sound, add that same hype to some heavy drum and bass and you will get unpleasant dominating bass, even more unpleasant than regular drum and bass (if that is at all possible).

The way an acoustics firm would measure frequency response is a little bit different than the way we in the orbiting headquarters do it. Ideally response is measure by playing pure tones that do not vary in volume at all, like a sine wave, through a set of speakers at different frequencies. Frequency, like in a processor is measured in Hertz (Hz) the faster the frequency the higher the given pitch. For instance in the United States more often than not 'A 440' is the note that most orchestras tune to and is the 'A' below middle 'C'. Acoustic firms will use a special microphone and computer to calculate the spectrum. At Ars we don't have that luxury, so we do it the old fashioned way. We take a sound pressure level meter (SPL meter) and record the level of sound pressure, measured in decibels (dB) that the speaker plays each tone at. In our case we have 85 points of data ranging from 10Hz all the way up to 20Khz, after all tones are recorded we than find the average dB level of all the tones and than find a level of deviation from that number of each tone, giving us a ± number and therefore the amount of hype or lack there of of each frequency. We then plot all of the data points on a graph, the y axis equalling the amount of decibels and the x axis being the frequency of the tone tested. Now if we just added a line to our graph through the plotted points our graph would look nothing like a frequency response graph you are used to looking at, after all we don't have the equipment or the environment that high-end facilities enjoy. We use an equation to determine the basic trend of our graphs. In this case we felt sixth order polynomials most accurately depicted the graphed information, we have included the equation used for each calculation with the graph for all of you math geeks that get off on that kind of thing. So to sum it up, the farther away from 0 dB, in either direction that the curve deviates the worse that is for our overall sound. Also the more peaks and valleys our curve has the worse it is for the overall sound. So let's se how Apple's Hi-Fi faired in our tests.

In all of our graphs the Apple unit is represented by either the red square or the red line. The dots represent our 85 measurements while the curves represent the general trend of the readings, as determined by our equation. The Apple Hi-Fi unit is rated at 53 Hz to 16kHz and in the low end our tests showed that the low end crosses the 0dB mark at somewhere around the 45Hz line which is a positive thing for Apple. This means they, by our test results, understated their low end response. Our trend shows us a ever so gradual rise in hype from 90Hz up through about 3000Hz range before the we have a decline towards the trends eventual demise. Ideally this would be a flat line but we will take the very slight decline for this level of speaker, in fact it is somewhat impressive. On the high-end our numbers were somewhat disappointing for Apple, crossing the 0dB line well before the advertised 16kHz mark. In its defense the polynomial trend only represented the data plot somewhat as, for the most part the data points didn't fall below the 0dB level until the 16kHz mark. The drop off between 9Khz and 12.5 KHz had a bigger effect on the trend then we would have like to see. We would have hoped for a higher frequency response than this unit offered, 11.5 kHz is disappointing but it might not be truly acurate.