Ok I'll keep this short due to the fact I only had about 20 minutes with this unit. I work at Circuit City where we sell this sound dock made exclusively for the ipod. It retails for $299 which puts it quite a bit higher than the models offered by competitors we carry.
First off, it looks very nice and is very compact. What do you expect? Its Bose. The one we have on display has an ipod mini secuerley locked into place so we are not able to remove it and put another ipod in its stead. On said mini there are no actual songs, just demo clips selected by Bose. As you may imagine, the clips don't have a lot of bass and mainly vocals. I have to admit that I am not a Bose believer by any means but, after a few weeks of listening to it I started to really like it. It sounded much better than the cheaper smaller units. However, in the other units I was actually placing an ipod in them with real songs downloaded from some of the other employee's personal computers consisting of mostly rap.
Well just yesterday in walks this guy saying he is interested in the Bose unit but he wanted to listen to actual songs and not demo clips. Smart shopper. I informed him that I could not remove the ipod mini in the display but he was more than welcome to purchase the unit and I would set it up for him and plug in the other ipod with all the rap music on it. After about 45 minutes of mulling and pacing he agreed to do so after I assured him he could return it on the spot if he were not happy with it for a full refund.
On to the review which as promised will be very short. It is extremely easy to hook up the Bose unit as all you need to do is plug it into a power souce and pop your ipod on the dock. When you get your player in place the unit automatically turns on and starts charging your battery which is nice. I looked for some of the more taxing songs on the 30 gig video ipod I was using and I chose "no diggity" for the first test run. To those of you not familiar with this track or not into rap music, it contains lots of mids and real challegning lows without many highs. Well, the Bose unit immidiately began to struggle. At any sort of acceptable volume the poor thing was distorting everytime it was called on to produce bass. We tried many R&B and rap tracks and the result was always the same. Less than average highs, real clear mids and horrible in the bass department. I guess I should not have expected anything different from such small drivers but for $300 they could have done better. The one nice thing I will say aside from the respectable midrange is that this unit creates a very large field of sound. What I mean by that is there is no actual sweet spot I could find. If I were standing to the side or directly in front of it I heard almost the exact same sound.
On a scale of 1 - 10 I give this thing a 4. If it were a hundred bucks less I would consider a 6. If you have $300 to spend on a speaker setup for an ipod, chances are you already have a decent home stereo or theater set up. Just get the cables to hook your mp3 player to it and don't think twice about the Bose. On the other hand if you need something small and portable I have heard that Klipchs makes a unit similar in size to the Bose for $50 less. I have not seen it but would think that it would be at very least equal in sound quality.
