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iPods and Other Players
Apple’s iPods have long been our
favorite portable music players, and we
have reviewed its incarnations several
times, starting with one that still had a
physical click wheel.
Our current model is the 4th Generation
iPod touch, which, more than ever,
can be described as “the iPhone without
the phone.”
But how does it sound? It is, after all, a
music player as well as a PDA. Our firstgeneration
iPod touch certainly sounded
better than our iPod Photo, which had
an actual hard disc inside. Our finding
is that the new model sounds about the
same with lossless music (our motto: jst
sy no to lssy comprssn). That is to say,
it’s slightly soft compared to the original
CD in a good player and with the same
high-quality headphones, but by any
standard it sounds amazingly good.
We’ve been looking over iPod accessories
too, and Griffin (griffintechnologies.com)
kindly sent over a couple of
them we want to tell you about.
The first is the PowerBlock Reserve,
a beautifully-designed little battery you
78 ULTRA HIGH FIDELITY Magazine
can use to more than double the run
time of an iPhone or any iPod with a
dock connector. It consists of a compact
charger and the battery module, which
is magnetic, and glides onto the charger
as by magic.
On most trips, you can bring just the
fully-charged battery, and you’re good
for dozens of extra hours. It costs $50,
with street price somewhat lower. The
down sides? It doesn’t have the oomph
to run an iPad (which is also an iPod,
though Apple doesn’t stress that), and
on an iPod touch it blocks access to the
headphone jack.
The other killer device from Griffin
is the Navigate, a small control device
you plug between the dock connector
and your headphones.
What is it? It’s a headphone amplifier,
which substitutes for the one in the iPod.
It’s a control device, with buttons that
let you skip tracks and change volume.
And it’s even an FM radio. It has a small
luminous screen so you can see what
you’re doing. Unfortunately, the button
legends are black on black, and unless
you’ve memorized their placement you’ll
be — all too literally — in the dark.
It’s expensive for an iPod accessory
too, with a $60 price tag, but it’s so practical
that we give it two thumbs up.
Finally, we have sad news about
one other, older, portable player, the
Sony Walkman. Sony will stop making
them.
No, we didn’t realize they were still
making them either, but Sony doesn’t
quit easily. It was relatively recently
that Sony stores stopped stocking Beta
video players, giving new meaning to the
phrase, “Forgotten but not gone.”
In truth we loved the Walkman,
which — until it was commoditized for
the price-driven market — was terrific.
We still have a Walkman Professional,
the WMD6, once the bootleg record
producer’s tool. Who remembers when
the acronym “WMD” meant audio on
the go, and not a pretext for military
invasion?
Incidentally, the name will live
on, because Chinese companies will
continue production, at least for the
domestic market, under license from
Sony. And that’s not counting the
“Sonny Workmans” you can buy in
dollar stores. The name also lives on as
the trademark on Sony’s current digital
players, which own a vanishingly small
part of the market. “Walkman” was
once a great brand name, but then so
was “Polaroid.” Both are now symbols of
long-obsolete technologies. Using them
on modern products can only drag them
down.