Listening to my iPod
The iPod more than any previous technology has spawned a whole world of accessories. Here are some of my favourites. Far be it from me to criticise Apple’s marketing organisation but I do think they’ve missed a couple of tricks. All the adverts seem to portray someone walking down the street listening to music on a glorified walkman. Whilst this is fine and dandy it’s not why I bought mine and it’s not how I sell (the concept) to my friends.
When/How I use my iPod
- In my car
- At home on my hi-fi (perfect for evenings in as you never have to change the cd)
- In hotels/travelling
- Outdoors (camping, picnics, etc)
- Commuting (usually listening to podcasts/radio rather than music)
Listening on your hi-fi
There are a couple of ways of listening on your existing hi-fi. The easiest is just to hook up your iPod to your amplifier using 3.5mm to phono leads - I recommend Profigold (decent quality, under a tenner) - I bought mine from TV Cables.
I would strongly recommend you use the Apple Dock for this as you get significantly better quality than using the headphone connection at the top of the iPod - try it for yourself - it’s definitely noticeable - and if you can’t hear the difference - you’ve just saved £25! The other benefit is you can use a remote control which saves you ever getting off your fat arse…
There is also a much cooler approach - streaming from your PC (assuming it is always on) and the best way to do this is using the Squeezebox (from $249/£299). This very cool piece of kit has just got much better due to an integration with a really cool bit of software Pandora - but let me just explain how it works.
Squeezebox has wireless ethernet built in (as well as wired) and can stream music from your PC. It also has high quality audio connections to hook up to your hi-fi (including digital) - for more info see here.
So - you can use the delivered remote to listen to and manage any music on iTunes, which is great. Addtionally you can listen to internet radio stations (but they’re fairly crap on the whole) and the cool, new bit is that you can listen to pandora… and pandora is my favourite bit of software this year - you can enter an artist or track and it will then generate a playlist on the fly based on your choice, using information it has about 10,000 artists - so if you enter Oasis you get lots of tracks which are similar to the sort of music that Oasis plays.
The third option is through external speakers - I use Creative TravelSound (cheap, very portable
(size of 2 iPods), runs on batteries (better sound quality on mains power) and £40.
There are lots of other options - the best quality I’ve heard is the Bose SoundDeck - beautiful, rich Bose sound but at £249 it’s not cheap, and it’s not portable - but if you want an iPod based hi-fi it’s probably the best there is.
* STOP PRESS * 27/02/2006
Just seen this from Cyrus, very well known British hi-fi brand have just moved into wireless audio and iPod accessories - the DockLink - beautifully designed, 5* rating from What Hi-Fi and a bargain at £69
