B&W iPod Speaker

[george_k]

What if Classe' efforts and resources were used to build the Zeppelin and B&W simply managed the project..

Do you know something we don't?

[sikoniko]

Do you know something we don't?

of course he does.. he works for them...

[Pookie007]

Has anyone heard it? I travel all the time and own 3 different Ipods (1 in the car, one in the carry on, 1 for the gym). You can't beat the convenience. I will gladly take the sound quality of an Ipod over a conversation with annoying person next to me on the airplane. It would be nice to be able to drop my Ipod in a smaller unit for the bedroom or office. I don't have room for a set of floorstanding speakers, preamp, amp, and sub.

[Race Car Driver]

Ipod speakers may not be the state of the art, but you have to sell potatoes if you're going to feed the masses (i'm hoping the Ipod speaker is a very good potato). Signature series and such are not a growth segment, selling 50 50K dollar speakers does not pay the rent, however selling 100K 1000 dollar speakers does. BW has to strive to build marketable speakers that are still of excellent quality. The silly money ones can serve as "halo" models. I can't wait till they come up with car audio instead of just concepts. If they maintain the sound they are famous for they can't lose.

Ding ding ding.

[RobP]

I think this little unit is a great idea, I would buy one for my kitchen, it may not be the most acurate for of audio, but who really cares? I dont need a full blown system in every room of my home.........

[jack667]

The Zeppelin is interesting. I am intrigued to know how well it will do, seeing as B&W is a highly respected company in the audio industry.

Apple have just dropped their iPod Hifi (quietly I might add) - I'm guessing because it sounded like crap, and had some terrible reviews.

We have to accept times are changing and the iPod is a fantastic piece of technology. Anyone who disagrees is talking utter nonsense. Yes, it can be spoiled by cramming thousands of low bit rate tracks onto the thing, but if you know what you're doing and use decent quality files, you will see that it's more than worth its value.

I'm not going to judge until I hear the Zep, but I should imagine that it's going to sound better than all of the trash thats out there already - right?

It's all very well saying you can buy a pair of speakers and a receiver and get far better sound quality, but let's not forget, JUST like the iPod, this is a CONVENIENCE item, people don't want something taking up tonnes of space.

The B&W Zep is one of the most expensive iPod stereos on the market, to my eyes it looks great. Hopefully B&W can use this to draw people into their range of speakers, but I should imagine the conversion rate is going to be extremely low!

Just my two ... pennies (I'm from London)

[misterdoggy]

I was on the road for 8 hours on Sunday, and had the chance to listen to it extensively through my car stereo during the entire drive. Using the random song selection feature, it was enjoyable to listen to a varied collection of songs.

Beden,

How did you get to listen to your car stereo using your ipod as the source ?

I would like to do that.

Ipod is a great source and if you read all the magazine reviews it rates pretty high up as a source of music

I have used my sons Ipod as a source thru the preamp and the sound is pretty darn impressive :T :T :T

[beden1]

I bought a cassette adaptor at Circuit City and it works great. Just pop it into the cassette and plug in the iPod and you're there.

I also found it's better to keep the volume of the iPod at 1/3rd (or under 1/2), and use your car volume knob for volume adjustments. Any higher and you could start to get distortion.

I drove down to Florida from PA this week and was playing the iPod through the car stereo. I started hearing what sounded like a blown speaker and it was driving me nuts for a couple of hours. I finally realized that I had inadvertently raised the volume on the iPod to over 1/2. After I adjusted it back down, the damaged speaker sound went away . . . thankfully!