review by Bill Palmer

Back at Macworld Expo in January of 2008, while being given a tour of the XtremeMac booth, I spotted a super-slim iPod/iPhone alarm clock called the Luna Voyager. Excited by the prospects I asked for a demo but was told that it wasn’t a finished functioning unit. Fast forward twenty-one months, so long a span of time that XtremeMac has since become part of Imation, and the fully functioning Luna Voyager has finally arrived. And it’s even tinier than I remembered.



Which is a good thing, of course, as traveling with something like an iPod alarm clock can be a pain if it’s too large, particularly with luggage restrictions of late. Minimalistic in every sense, the Voyager only has two tiny visible buttons and a wheel, with recessed speaker grilles on each side. Not much more than an inch tall, the product looks vaguely like an external hard drive laid on its side, both in terms of size and styling. But plug it in (or pop in batteries) and the front lights up with the time of day in bright blue. Drop your iPhone or iPod into the centered dock on the top, set the alarm with a few buttons (the Voyager can automatically set the time of day by getting it from your iPhone or iPod), and you’re off to the races. You can even make a “Luna” playlist in iTunes and wake to that instead of the most recent song played.



Any iPod/iPhone alarm clock is going to necessarily draw comparisons to iHome’s leading line of similar products, and in this case I was expecting the Luna Voyager to square off directly with iHome’s similarly portable iP27 product. However, putting the two next to each other, the iP27 suddenly looks monster-sized – something of a revelation considering how many thousands of miles I’ve traveled with the iP27, and never thought of it as being oversized until now. Actually come to think of it, iHome’s earlier iH26 was smaller than the current model, but the Luna Voyager is significantly smaller than even the iH26.



With that revelation, my expectations for audio quality changed altogether. And as it turned out, my revised expectations proved to be correct. The Luna Voyager sounds merely okay. Impressive audio for its size, actually, but it’s immediately apparent how they managed to get it so small in the first place. I wouldn’t mind waking up to it every day, but the compromise comes when you consider using it for music playback during the rest of the day when you’re fully awake. Whereas the iP27 sounds (just barely) good enough to be used as an all-day speaker system while on the road, the Luna Voyager just doesn’t cut it in that department.



None of which is to distract from its appeal when it comes to its strictly intended use, which is to allow you to wake up to your own music. In my tests I found that the two buttons didn’t suffer in their ease of use due to their tininess, and the alarm fades in with a gradual volume increase, as I’d hoped it would. And the Luna Voyager manages to accomplish with two buttons and a wheel (plus two switches on the back) what it took iHome nine different buttons to pull off on the iP27. Still, I can tell you from experience that traveling with a product like this usually means that you’ll be in a hotel and looking to use it as a daytime playback device at one point in your trip or another. And the Luna Voyager doesn’t sound that much better than the middling speakers built into my laptop.



When it comes to the value proposition, the $79 Luna Voyager comes with basically nothing, whereas the $99 iP27 comes with a remote control and velcro carrying case. Pick up the Luna Voyager for its current $62 price on Amazon.com and it becomes a much better value, but the bottom line is that the product’s lone significant feature is that it’s slim and light and therefore very easy to fit into your suitcase.



I’m just not sure how many users would want to bother lugging along an iPhone alarm clock, even one this tiny, if they’re only going to get this kind of audio quality when they get there; it just has the feeling of “niche product” written all over it. That having been said, this product does one thing and does it really well, and I actually look forward to traveling with it on trips where I need to pack light or when I know I’m not going to have any idle time back at the hotel to use it for daytime music playback anyway.



I suppose I’m personally disappointed with the results because I’ve had high expectations for it the past two years, and it’s turned out to be merely mortal after all. But you’ll probably eat it up if you’re a part of the niche that the Luna Voyager is squarely aimed at.

Learn more about the Luna Voyager at XtremeMac.com.

review by Bill Palmer

Sixteen hundred dollars. Yeah, you read that correctly. Can any iPhone accessory possibly be worth that kind of price tag? Parrot wants to find out, with this new product designed by famous French product designer Philippe Starck (although the product is named “Zimku” it’s more commonly referred to as “Parrot by Starck”), and more tangibly, it comes in the form of two standalone speaker towers that connect to each other wirelessly. Cone-shaped on bottom, each tower funnels up into a rectangular shape that’s only about five inches wide and one inch deep, with an iPhone/iPod dock on the top of one tower and playback controls on top of the other.



If you’re going to spend the kind of money on an iPod/iPhone stereo system that could instead be used to buy an iPhone and an iPod touch plus all nine colors of iPod nano and still have money left over, then it had better offer a mind blowing experience. Not great. Not excellent. Mind blowing. Nothing less. And after having spent quality time this week with the Parrot by Starck, set up in various positions around the house, I can report back that the experience did in fact blow my mind. Is it perfect? No, and I’ll get to that. Is it worth $1600? As always, that’ll be for each of you to decide after reading the review. But here are my experiences and conclusions.



The first litmus test with any wireless product is ease of setup, and in this case, after taking the two towers out of their rather large box and plugging each into an electrical outlet, I found that there was no wireless setup to even worry about. I placed my iPhone into the dock, hit the play button, and music came out of both speakers. Ideally, wireless products should be as easy to set up as wired ones, and while that’s not always the case with various products I’ve tested, it is with this one.

As far as range, I started with the towers ten feet apart from each other, then twenty, then thirty, then forty, all with success. It wasn’t until I placed them about fifty feet apart (with two walls in between them) that I started to get some flakiness from the second tower. It’s not that the audio quality ever did degrade, just that it started to cut out intermittently at that distance. So figure on being able to use these up to roughly fifty feet apart within the same room, a little less if you’re going to put them in different rooms. In any case you’re probably most likely to position them ten two twenty feet apart in the same room, but it’s nice to have the extra flexibility.



Having passed the setup and range tests, it was time to move on to testing what really matters, which is of course audio quality. The music that comes out of the Parrot by Starck is just plain beautiful. Amazing. Stunning. Pick a word, they’re all understatements. The clarity is exquisite. The higher ranges and lower ranges all sound fantastic.



But then you probably already guessed all of that, based just on the price tag. At this price point, and also at this size, the Parrot by Starck had better go beyond merely delivering beautiful rich music, which you can get from a product a fifth the size and a fifth the price. It needs to offer something substantially more. Sure, you can crank the Starck loud enough to literally wake the neighbors without any loss of audio quality (actually, at its top volume, I think the Starck could not only wake your neighbors but enrage them to the point where they come over to your house and murder you), but it’s not just about high-fidelity volume, either. Placing one tower on each side of my desk, both facing me, I felt so immersed in the music that it seemed to be a part of the room itself as opposed to coming from any particular direction – and that’s what you can’t get from even the best of the $300 desktop dockable systems. It’s quite a price premium, but the immersion does offer an entirely different kind of listening experience.



My only criticism of the Starck is with what you can’t do with it. The included remote impressively also works through walls, all too rare in this market, but lacks the ability to navigate the iPhone’s or iPod’s menus, a feature that’s increasingly commonplace on even $100 systems. And perhaps more importantly, you can’t adjust the Starck’s bass or treble ratio. Not that you’d necessarily want to, seeing how stunning it sounds out of the box. But again, this is a standard inclusion for many less-expensive competing products.



Obviously you have to be at a certain income or wealth level in order to afford the $1600 Parrot by Starck in the first place. But if you are, then consider yourself lucky, as the listening experience is nothing short of amazing. It can also be used as a computer speaker system.

Learn more about the Parrot by Starck at Parrot.

review by Bill Palmer

When Apple appends the word “classic” to the name of one of its products, it’s typically an intentional death knell: the gradual phase-out begins immediately, and there will be no significant upgrades to the product in the mean time. But apparently Altec Lansing has a different definition of the word, as the new “inMotion Classic” (also known as the iMT620) includes a number of revisions and enhancements despite having largely the same feature set on paper as its predecessor, the iM600.



Not that the two look anything like each other. Gone is the all-black, rounded corner design of the iM600 in favor of Altec Lansing’s current favored trapezoidal styling of black and silver with gold trim, with the clearly defined line giving the illusion that the Classic is smaller when it’s really about the same size as its predecessor (actually about an inch wider left to right). The biggest functional change is that the old flip-out dock has been replaced a recessed one, and the unit now stands upright thanks to a swing-out arm that acts as a stand (and can also be folded straight up and used as a carrying handle). Perhaps it’s this simplification that allowed room in the budget for other new features. The bundled remote control now includes the ability to navigate up and down your iPhone’s or iPod’s menus. And the LCD screen, which was kind of a waste on the iM600 because it only displayed the track info from FM radio and not from songs playing on your iPod, now rectifies that. It still misidentifies your iPhone as an “iPod” but that’s being picky.



Audio quality is marginally improved on the Classic. It wasn’t immediately noticeable when I put the Classic and iM600 side by side, but it became more apparent when I got to songs that were more bass-heavy. I wouldn’t suggest ditching your iM600 in favor of the Classic based on the slightly improved audio quality alone; it’s the other features that make this a significant upgrade.



In fact, perhaps surprisingly, the Classic pretty much wipes the floor with Logitech’s new competing S315i, which is twenty dollars cheaper but doesn’t come all that close on audio quality and doesn’t come with a remote, or offer a built-in radio or an LCD screen or a built-in handle. However, the Classic falls down significantly in comparison to the S315i in one area: battery life. Both products include a built-in rechargeable lithium battery. But while the S315i offers ten hours of battery life (twenty in “reduced audio quality” mode), the Classic offers a comparatively meager five hours – and that’s with the Classic being about twenty percent thicker front to back than the S315i. It’s not quite as head-scratching as Altec’s slightly larger MAX, which only offers 3.5 hours of battery life, but it’s still unfortunate that the Classic offers only half the battery life of its primary competitor, when it otherwise outpaces it in just about every way.



And that alone keeps the Classic from being a five star product, despite the fact that overall it’s the best portable iPod/iPhone system at the sub-$150 price point to ever hit the market.



There’s one other issue with the Classic which initially threw me off and eventually grew to feel like a very minor thing, but worth mentioning if for no other reason than future reference: the on-board control buttons, which were semi-randomly split between the top surface and the docking well of the old iM600, have been smartly all placed on the top of the Classic. However, they’ve been centered in such a way that the two buttons you’re likely to use most often during playback, volume up and volume down, are directly behind the docking well. With a shorter device like an iPod nano they’re still visible, but my iPhone stood tall enough to hide them, at least when I had the Classic sitting at eye level. And so the first few times I reached for the volume I absent-mindedly rammed my fingers into my iPhone. Within my first day with the unit I’d gotten very used to accessing them easily, and I’m a klutz to begin with. But the six topside buttons really should be split left and right of the dock on the next iteration of this product. Ultimately, however, I felt that this wasn’t something that should affect the product’s rating, particularly since the new button layout does make more sense than the previous iterations’ scattershot placement.



Consider the Logitech S315i if you place battery life above all else. But otherwise, Altec Lansing’s Classic is your winner for portable systems at this price point – by a long shot.

Learn more about the inMotion Classic at AltecLansing.com.

by Bill Palmer

Back in the early days of the iPod, there were portable dockable stereo systems and then there was Altec Lansing’s iM7, a giant all-white $249 cylindrical tube shaped system that ran on batteries and could be hoisted on your shoulder like a ghetto blaster and was bigger and badder (and better sounding) than any other portable dockable system on the market.



But like so many iPod accessories from the early days, the iM7 eventually went by the wayside and was never really replaced by anything comparable, either from Altec Lansing or from anyone else – until now. The MIX, also known as the iMT800, may not look much like the old iM7, as the MIX has a black body with silver handles (two on the front, one on the top) and the same gold trim currently featured on the company’s earbud line, but it embodies the iM7’s original spirit. Shaped trapezoidally from the top, rectangularly from the front, and feeling a bit lighter when you pick up than you might have expected, the MIX is an intimidating monster of a system. And that’s before you turn it on.



Any product like the MIX is going to require a necessary amount of potential skepticism right out of the box, not only because it costs three hundred dollars (at a time when most vendors are scrambling to produce less expensive versions of their most popular products), but also because the company is asking you to carry around something this large: is it easily carried? Does it offer enough battery life for the portability to be put to good use? Is the included remote decent? And, of course, the most important question of all: is the audio quality strong enough to make any of the above even matter, or is this one of those products that throws in the kitchen sink in an attempt to hide the fact that there’s no kitchen?



Eyeballing the MIX, I expected it to weigh fifteen to twenty pounds, so I was relieved when I picked it up and found that it weighed closer to ten. The handle on top allows you to carry it in one hand at your side (or if you really want to, on your shoulder), while the pair of handles on the front allows you to carry it front of you with both hands. But perhaps more important than than flexibility is that you can carry it around with your iPhone or iPod docked in the unit, thanks to a metal roll bar (padded on the inside) that slides down onto the top of your device and holds it securely in place, within what is otherwise a standard Universal dock. This feature drew immediate skepticism as I recalled how the proprietary secure enclosure on the old iM7, which worked flawlessly with the iPod models that were on the market at the time, ended up being increasingly unusable with later iPod models that just plain didn’t fit into the enclosure, and ultimately likely led to the iM7’s early demise. But the roll bar here on the MIX is a different beast. Instead of trying to contain your device within the unit as the iM7 did, the MIX allows your device to be on the outside of the unit but still securely in place. After having tested it with everything from the iPhone to iPod nano, I’m left to conclude that the roll bar is designed such that any future iPhone and iPod models will also be fully compatible with the MIX, provided they’re not physically larger than the largest current models. For those of us who never could quite get the iPod nano to work satisfactorily with the iM7, the importance of the MIX’s apparent forward compatibility cannot be overstated.



But there are sexier features to talk about than a roll bar, and plenty of them. The orange LCD screen displays track information for your iPhone or iPod, as well as any track info provided by the FM radio station you’re listening to, along with an old school pull-out metal antenna for said radio purposes. And the feature that Altec Lansing is promoting the heaviest is the pair of line-in ports on the top of the unit that allow two additional audio devices to be attached. Such ports have traditionally been posited merely as a method of connecting a non-dockable device such as an iPod shuffle or a non-iPod, and are usually buried quietly on the back. But Altec is taking an entirely different tack here, instead promoting the idea of using the MIX at a party and allowing a couple of friends to connect their own iPods or iPhones while yours is in the dock, and using the on-board controls or the included remote to toggle between them at will. As such, the top well for the handle can be used as a makeshift quasi-dock, or the devices can simply be laid on top of the unit.



Speaking of the remote, the portability motif is extended here with a spring-loaded belt clip at the end of the remote itself which will allow you to carry it around at a party without losing track of it. And borrowing a good idea from the old iM7, the MIX‘s remote can be tucked away into a slot on the unit itself when not in use. Also on the remote are four preset buttons for the radio, along with an EQ adjustment button (the latter of which is also built into the on board controls).



But in the end, what matters above all else is audio quality. Judging the MIX’s audible output is best done by comparing it to other similar products on the market, and frankly speaking, there are none. It’s tempting to try to draw parallels between the MIX and iHome’s new iP1 because they share the same price tag and roughly similar size, but the two products really have nothing to do with each other, as the iP1 is a stationary system based purely on impeccable audio quality, whereas the MIX is a portable system that takes the kitchen sink approach. That the iP1 sounds better than the MIX is as expected as it is irrelevant for review purposes, other than to emphasize the self-evident fact that features like portability and built-in radio do cost money, and as such products with those features should only be purchased if you plan to put those features to use.
The more relevant comparison is whether the MIX is really worth a hundred dollars more than Altec’s own $199 MAX, and the answer there is a resounding yes. While the MAX sounds great for its size, the MIX blows it away with four front-facing speakers and a side-firing subwoofers. The short of it is that the MIX is by far the best-sounding portable stereo system for iPhone and iPod currently on the market at any price.



And I suspect that’s what will ultimately make MIX users the happiest. The “party” angle, with the extra aux ports, while it makes a great marketing push, isn’t going to make or break the product; even those who buy the MIX with partying in mind will still likely log most of their hours with the MIX back in their office or dorm room. But regardless of whether you plan to put the party aspect to use or not, the bottom line is that would be a category-killing five star product even without the partying angle.



So what puts the MIX over the top? In an era where more and more portable stereo systems are coming with built-in lithium batteries, something I generally favor, a unit of this size wouldn’t last very long on a lithium battery (as evidenced by the MAX’s paltry three hour battery life, and it’s not nearly as big). But the MIX, which runs on eight D batteries? Thirty hours of real-world use, which makes me pleased that, in this instance, they didn’t go the lithium route after all.

Learn more about the Altec Lansing MIX (iMT800) at AltecLansing.com

review by Bill Palmer

With an impressive rollout at CES in January that included a hands-on demonstration by legendary record producer Tony Bongiovi, and seven months of subsequent anticipation before it finally officially hit the market, iHome’s space-age looking and not-inconsequently priced iP1 was destined to be the biggest new accessory to hit the iPhone and iPod market in 2009 – or the biggest flop – and nothing in between. Could a company known primarily for its “great sounding (for its price tag)” iPod alarm clocks in the hundred dollar price range manage to successfully conquer the high end of the dockable stereo market with one ambitious first swing?



After we spent some time with the iP1 inside iHome’s sound room in January, we were betting on the affirmative, as we found it surprisingly easy to peg the iP1 as the best-sounding dockable stereo system in this price range we’d ever heard – and that was before the “B” button was even demonstrated for us.



But just as anyone can sound decent while singing in the isolated confines of the shower, any speaker system can sound better in an acoustic room than it does in the real world. I needed to hear the iP1 outside of a constructed sound room and in more typical end-user surroundings, in this instance sitting on a kitchen table. And after having put the system through its paces with my iPhone, my iPod nano, my music, and my surroundings, I’m even more impressed with it now than I was in January.



Although the iP1 would be worth its price tag even without the “B” button (the “B” stands for Bongiovi, who designed the technology for iHome), it’s the ability to fire up this button that puts the iP1 over the top into category-killer territory. While I’ve seen plenty of cheaper stereo systems that included a button that would either enhance the bass or expand the spatiality of the audio, such options have generally had a synthetic quality to them, much like how a digital zoom on a camera is better than nothing but is really just a poor man’s substitute for a true optical zoom. But with the iP1, the Bongiovi button is a whole different creature, monitoring the music’s frequency spectrum for peaks and valleys and accentuating them appropriately.



If that sounds like a bunch of technical mumbo jumbo, then all you have to know is that it works. The catch is that the worse-sounding the music, for instance an older recording that has lost something when compressed into AAC or MP3, the more the B button can do for it. But even when testing out the iP1 with current albums that were purchased straight from iTunes (which are typically encoded right from the master recording), there was almost always a noticeable and desirable improvement when the B button was activated. I suspect that much like how the “enhance” button in iPhoto will occasionally turn a photo purple in its attempts to improve the color and light balance, there is perhaps the oddball occasional song that actually sounds worse with the iP1’s B button activated – but after having tested more than fifty songs from various eras and genres, I couldn’t find one. In any case, as its name implies, the B button effect can be turned off with the touch of a, well, button, if and when it’s not desirable.



The aesthetics of the iP1 are daring beyond just choice of shape or material. In fact the entire unit only has one solid face, that being the thick slab of tinted clear plastic that constitutes the unit’s front face. Two large cylindrical speakers protrude from the back of the front face, with a black slab between them, and the unit reclines on the cylinders. Despite not having a true back, top, or sides, the unit is plenty stable and is arguably the first speaker system so far in the twenty-first century that actually looks like it belongs in the twenty-first century, looking ultra-modern without feeling gimmicky. Ultimately, aesthetics are something each user will have to judge on their own, but I found that the unit looked equally impressive in a trade show sound room and on a cluttered kitchen table.


Down to the details, the iP1 comes with a remote that includes adjustable bass and treble along with iPod/iPhone menu navigation and, of course, another B button on the remote. Also in the box are a pair of open-face speaker grilles for aesthetic purposes. And built-in video-out allows you to play your iPhone or iPod’s video on your television while using the iP1’s audio.



The iP1 eschews Apple’s official universal docking system of custom-fit inserts for each iPhone and iPod model, in favor of a simple protruding shelf for docking your iPhone or iPod, along with cylindrical rubber stopper that twists out to rest against the back of your device. Some super-cheap systems sidestep the universal dock simply to avoid the cost of licensing it. But here it makes sense both from an aesthetic and functional standpoint, adding to the minimalism of the unit and staying consistent with the exposed styling.



When it comes to competing dockable iPhone/iPod stereo systems in this price range, I’ve spent time with them all. It’s not a surprise that the iP1 sounds better than the identically priced system from Bose, as the Bose unit has always been a nice $200 product saddled with a $300 price tag. And although it’s not a fair comparison since none of Altec Lansing’s dockable units costs more than $200, the iP1 blows them away. A more fair comparison based on price would be Apple’s own recently discontinued iPod HiFi, which sounded fantastic and sold for $349 but didn’t come all that close to sounding as good as the iP1.



None of this is to denigrate any of the competing products out there, some of which are excellent in their own right. But improbable as it may seem for a newcomer in this price range, the iP1 immediately becomes the new king of the hill even before you consider the B button technology – similarly, come to think of it, to how iHome’s original iH5 product immediately became the best-sounding $99 dockable iPod stereo system out there before you even considered its alarm clock functionality. The iH5 sent the industry scrambling for an answer which eventually brought a whole wave of impressive competing $99 products to market. And the same thing will likely happen now, as the established vendors in this price range attempt to recover from having been simultaneously leapfrogged in design, audio quality, and underlying technology.



But that’s all down the road, perhaps at the next round of trade shows. For now, the bottom line it that the iHome iP1 is the most impressive iPhone or iPod accessory of any kind to come to market in 2009. And although you never know for sure, I expect that’ll still be a true statement by the time the year comes to an end.

Learn more about the iP1 at iHomeAudio.com or pre-order for a discounted $249 at Amazon.com.