Darrell O'Neill Posted February 22, 2006 Posted February 22, 2006 Having finally met the 21st century and loaded all our music CD's etc onto IPods, The SWMBO and I are looking to replace the ageing stereo system in the lounge with some sort of IPod docking system and speakers.... Anyone have any recommendations or suggestions for suitable products The only requirement other than being of a good quality is that it must be loud!! Quote
MAT1800 Posted February 22, 2006 Posted February 22, 2006 3 What Hi-Fi 5 star products are.... Logitech mm50 - £100 Here Monitor Audio i-deck - £250 here Saitek Audio A-200 - £80 here Never had one myself tho' Quote
Muttleys V8 Posted February 22, 2006 Posted February 22, 2006 I have the Bose Ipod speakers, fanstastic peice of kit and loud with it. Steve Quote
amc_black Posted February 22, 2006 Posted February 22, 2006 I have a had the Bose SoundDock system for my iPod for over a year. The sound quality is AMAZING. It plays music well at all volumes and the sound is just incredible. Its the most expensive on the market but its worth every penny I just cant recommend it enough. Quote
adhawkins Posted February 22, 2006 Posted February 22, 2006 Get one of these. You'll never look back Andy Quote
ljsanders Posted February 22, 2006 Posted February 22, 2006 Slightly o/t. To be honest, I use my ipod for two things: - Using through a pair of Bose QuietComfort 2 headphones Great for airplanes and the office environment. - In the car connected through a Dension Icelink. In car sound quality isn't that important because road noise cancels out most of the improvements. Hooking up an ipod through a Hifi in my book doesn't cut the cake for me. Quite frankly it sounds crap, flat, 1 dimensional and slightly muffled regardless of the encoding. What is much better is to hook up one these to your phono inputs of a Hifi, then wirelessly lets you use your PC/iTunes setup as a server to browse via a remote and play your entire ipod collection. Encoding my CD's as 192kbps AAC, I've got one of these hooked up via a digital link to a Musical Fidelity 24bit DAC and to be honest I can't tell the difference between it and my Musical Fidelity X-Ray CD player. Much quicker and I rarely use my CD player now. Lee Quote
ljsanders Posted February 22, 2006 Posted February 22, 2006 Andy, does the soundsqueeze let your skip/fast forward through tracks? The Roku doesn't, mainly because the Roku treats the iTunes as an Internet radio stream and fast forwarding on an internet radio stream is technically quite difficult. Quote
smegablade Posted February 23, 2006 Posted February 23, 2006 Bought the Bose sounddock in the states last year whilst on holiday. Been very pleased with it and only cost £150 just had to get it in the luggage. Quote
Danny Posted February 23, 2006 Posted February 23, 2006 Bose Sound dock - £250 This is a great bit of kit, looks good too! Quote
adhawkins Posted February 23, 2006 Posted February 23, 2006 Andy, does the soundsqueeze let your skip/fast forward through tracks? It depends on the format of your music. The Squeezebox requires a 'server' PC to be running. This server PC streams the music to the Squeezebox. However, there is a control 'back channel' that lets you use the Squeezebox remote to skip back and forwards within a song, and select tracks etc. The whole thing can also be controlled via a web interface, so you can use your laptop / PDA to control it if you like. There's some real advantages of the Squeezebox over the other players that are out there: 1. It can handle FLAC files. These files are lossless, so sound a hell of a lot better than MP3s. I rip my CDs into a single FLAC file, with an embedded CUE sheet. This means I have one file per CD, and because it's lossless I can easily re-create the original CD, or extract all the tracks to convert to MP3 for my IPod. 2. The Squeezebox has digital outputs. If you rip correctly, you can rip the 5.1 / DTS soundtracks off DVDs and DTS audio CDs, and have this played through the Squeezebox and your 5.1 amp. As a result of this, since getting it, the only use our CDs get are: 1. They arrive, and I rip them to my linux box. 2. Luned occasionally takes them out to the car The linux box automatically rips to FLAC, and periodically I run a process that converts any new FLACs to MP3s to go onto my IPod. It really is fantastic Andy (no connection, other than a very satisfied customer) Quote
timd Posted February 23, 2006 Posted February 23, 2006 I think this is a setup issue TBH. Soundbridge can skip through songs when setup properly with a server. It also has digital outputs and can cope with DTS / 5.1 outputs. Quote
ljsanders Posted February 23, 2006 Posted February 23, 2006 At a risk of turning this into a music server discussion... Its not a setup issue with the Soundbridge, its a documented limitation (and requested feature) thats been discussed on the Roku labs forums. Its not that annoying... but the ability to be able to FF through a track is a nice to have. Another item I would like it to have is WPA wireless encryption support, so I have to leave my wireless set up for WEP, although my wireless network probably isn't worth cracking anyway Quote
timd Posted February 23, 2006 Posted February 23, 2006 Hmm, confused then. I'm sure I saw it skipping tracks, if not FFWDing.. Was running from mt-daapd on a linux server. Even their documentation makes mention of being able to do it. Quote
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