At one extreme is B&W’s awesome $600 Zeppelin audio system. At the other, SkullCandy’s “Pipe” portable speakers, which cost one-tenth as much.
Can you compare them? By no means. You need to look at each in the context of the specific purpose for which they are designed.
Bowers & Wilkins (B&W), the British maker of some of the world’s highest end speakers and a leading choice of recording engineers, clearly set out to create the ultimate iPod speaker dock. And they did it.
B&W is famous for the elegance of its sound. Crisp and clear, but never harsh. The ambience is of a warm concert hall or intimate club. Lots of detail and broad frequency response. The B&W sound is instrumental or vocal, not electronic.
Capturing that in a single-piece iPod dock took some doing. The 25-inch wide spheroid holds five drivers -- two tweeters (high notes), two mid-range (what it says), and one bass (lows). B&W used high-tech composites in the construction to control vibrations. A chrome arm extends from the device to hold the iPod dock, and the system integrates with the iPod’s controls so that you adjust tone and other speaker settings through your iPod.
The look is perhaps controversial (I thought it was highly stylish but my wife hated it), but there is nothing to dispute about the sound. Sheer excellence.
If there is a nit to pick, it’s that the matching spheroid remote control has only minimal functions and cannot navigate through the iPod’s menus, as the remotes of many more modest devices (include the Pipe) can. A B&W spokesperson says reason was to maintain a simplicity to the design. But with a unit this big, you are probably going to put it someplace a little out of the way. So a multi-function remote would be a good idea.
Now, why would you want to spend $600 for an iPod dock? You probably wouldn’t if that was you only intent. B&W effectively has admitted as much by introducing a $400 Zeppelin Mini, a more conventionally designed system that is priced closer to competing audiophile docks. The real value in the Zeppelin is that if you combine it with an iPod Classic loaded with music in lossless format, you wind up with a valid competitor to a traditional component audio system that would cost much more.
Think of it as a home stereo system redefined for the digital age.
If B&W is all about British elegance, SkullCandy is about skateboards, surf, rollerblades, and a slightly punk attitude. Its primary product line is headphones and earphones aimed at a young, active audience.
The Pipe is an 8-inch tube (essentially a smaller version of the cardboard roll inside a roll of paper towels) with speakers firing out of each end and an iPod docking port in the middle. The company’s skull logos are on the speaker grills, making it a dock with Attitude. I doubt that the audiophile market figured at all in the designers’ calculations.
Nevertheless for those who regularly take iPods and iPhone on the road, the Pipe has hit the sweet spot between size and sound that makes it one of the best “packable” iPod speaker systems I’ve used. Sound is good on a wide range of music -- it handles classical and jazz just as well as it does rock. It can crank up high volume and can also provide pleasing sound at lower don’t-antagonize-the-people-in-the-hotel-room-next-door levels.
The Pipe is available in black or chrome -- depending on what kind of style statement you want to make. It slips easily into a briefcase, backpack, or suitcase. A full-function remote is included as is an AC adapter. (Batteries are NOT included; four AAA cells are required.) There’s even an extra rubber leg included that attaches to the latch of the battery compartment to provide extra stability.
In their own ways, the Pipe and the Zeppelin prove that sometimes one size doesn’t fit all.
