I decided to pick up a small iPod dock this weekend - something that could be easily carried around to different parts of the house and plugged in wherever to play music directly off of an iPod/iPhone while charging it. I was surprised to see that the vast majority of devices on the market, even the more expensive ones, were built around a mono speaker design instead of stereo. I feel like I must be missing something - or is it just that, in an earbud society, people don’t’ even care and notice?
Because they’re so small that stereo separation would be unnoticeable if they contained two speakers. Stereo is only worth it if you can put at least a little distance between the left & right speakers (and ideally have them on opposite sides of your head so that your ears can make out the difference between the two channels).
The smallness - portability - likely contributed to the explosion, as you put it. One can literally carry 1,000+ songs in a shirt pocket. The equivalent of 50 cd’s give or take. The convenience factor. Sound quality is no where near a full out stereo system though and there are plenty of serious audiophiles who don’t use ipods.
From your link: "Ingeniously engineered inside one simple cabinet, Geneva Sound Systems provide everything you find in conventional stereo. The system above has a pair of full-range stereo speakers. "
I can understand it for the little bedside units and things like that. If you have two speakers close together like you would need them to be in a small unit like that, then you wouldn’t get much of a stereo effect anyway.
But the bigger units? Yeah, one speaker would bug me.
I guess the Katy Perry generation doesn’t really care much about sound quality.
Even the little bedside “clock radio” type on that site (Model XS) says that it has a “2.1 speaker system with two 1” tweeters and one 2¼" woofer". Still not mono.
Easy there old-timers There’s a little bit too much of a ‘get-the-hell-of-my-lawn’ vibe in this thread. Sure, Justin Bieber destroyed music, and then Rebecca Black came along and spat on its shallow grave. But what you’re saying here does not really add up; I don’t see how you can link a complaint about sound quality and in specific about no stereo available in devices, to earbuds, when earbuds or any type of headphone are a great example of what Patty here is talking about (emphasis mine)
If there was ever a musical generation that should appreciate stereo, it should be the earbud generation, if such a thing exists. So make sure you got your accusations right before you bring out your pitchforks!
Exactly - earbuds are perfect for stereo, whereas having two speakers six inches apart in an iPod dock is just a gimmick. Much better to have one decent mono speaker than two crappy ones for the same price.
Yeah, I think the premise of the OP needs some further examination. Looking at, say, Amazon it appears that the vast majority of the non-alarm clock type docks are stereo. Many look like one speaker, as the ones the OP linked to did, but actually contain two or more speakers.
Granted, the signal from an MP3 player isn’t going to equal what you’d get from a CD player. However, most people aren’t going to care or notice the difference.
In most cases, these docks, stereo or otherwise, are just one more piece of junk that really shouldn’t exist–unless you simply want an additional, low-wattage source of sound somewhere else in your house, workplace, etc., in which case by all rights they ought to have radios built in. The music systems that people had before iPods and other MP3 players all have amplifiers, and for most people the quality of sound from an MP3 is fine when plugged into your old stereo system, or even your over-sized boombox.
I think they make these things effectively mono because they want to market them as the modern version of the transistor radio. They want people to perceive it as something separate (and “less serious”) from their previous sound systems, and thereby to create the need to buy another, “supplemental” device.
Perhaps some audiophiles know more about the chronology of this, but Bose was very early into the iPod sound system market with their SoundDock. The appearance of this system has been imitated time and time again by numerous manufacturers.
I would be willing to stand corrected if Bose is not the first, but there’s more than a coincidental overlap in appearance between many different brands - just do a search at your favorite electronic retailer’s web site. Sony’s SpeakerDoc even has has a remarkably similar name. They’re clearly all imitating someone.
I’m sure it was, but why should I spend $600 to plug my MP3 player into that thing when I can already plug it into the $600 stereo system that I already have?
Well… I have the $250 version of the SoundDock, and it became the $250 stereo system that I already have.
Some day, I’ll splurge. In the meantime, the SoundDock was an amazing upgrade over my first stereo, which I received for Christmas back in the day when it made me the first kid on the block to be able to play CDs.
That’s great if you already have a $600 system. I imagine for a lot of people starting out these days an iPod may be the only “sound system” that they have ever had and thus a docking system makes perfect sense.
This will work if the iPod dock takes inputs from other devices, but that’s not the case for many of these products–the only thing you can use with it is an iPod. My point is that if you’re going to spend money, why even bother with a dock? Just get a regular stereo system, whatever your price range is. You can connect an iPod to anything.
Style, ease of use and setup, portability - take your pick. You have to admit, this thing looks pretty nifty, and if you want to set it up where there is no space or desire for a full-sized receiver, speaker wires and speakers, and all your music is on your iPod anyway, it makes a lot of sense.
I actually got some version of that (the SpeakerDoc) when I was looking for a dual alarm clock. It had all the features I wanted, plus a decent battery backup system, a dock, and a 3.5mm input. It was even half off! It works excellently as an alarm clock radio. I’m not sure I have anything else that could be called a sound system unless we’re also counting computers/computer speakers.
To be honest, I don’t have the ears to be an audiophile; I have tried to hear the difference between thing 1 and thing 2, I just can’t. I did learn to stay far away from Monster and Bose, so if that’s still true, something good came out of it.
For the question “why buy a dock instead of using my existing stereo” - I ran into a real problem with this. Buying a dock often gives you a remote control. Hooking up to the stereo does not.
I’m hoping that some solution gets created for this in the next couple of years. I want to use an MP3 player like my CD player.
Stereo is a funny thing. Many people are really only concerned that they get a sense of spaciousness from the replay, rather than worrying about the illusion of pinpoint instrument location and other effects. And an illusion is all it is anyway. (This applies even at the very high end - not all audiophiles care about imaging.) You can get a quite satisfactory sense of spaciousness without the traditional pair of speakers spaced along a wall. Further, many of these dock speaker systems are listened to at quite close range, and thus the angular separation of the drivers is still quite large. For a system that is designed to fill a room with sound that sounds good anywhere in the room, the better speaker docks do a very good job considering their constraints. Many are designed with this use in mind, and as such make no pretence about catering to the more traditional dedicated listening position style of reproduction. Indeed the big change in consumers is the move away from dedicated listening for pleasure. Home theatre is where it is at for consumers spending real money on sound systems. Then you buy into an entirely different form of listening, and reproduction.
The higher end docks now provide direct access to the iPod functionality over USB, and some even provide their own digital to analog conversion. Paired with lossless compression you have the potential for very high quality sound. Many modern amplifiers provide this capability now, including integrated control of the iPod.
There’s a little bit too much of a ‘get-the-hell-of-my-lawn’ vibe in this thread. Sure, Justin Bieber destroyed music, and then Rebecca Black came along and spat on its shallow grave. But what you’re saying here does not really add up; I don’t see how you can link a complaint about sound quality and in specific about no stereo available in devices, to earbuds, when earbuds or any type of headphone are a great example of what Patty here is talking about (emphasis mine)