Short Version: You want to listen to Fergie in the kitchen. Don’t worry, I understand. Fergie and cooking eggs just go together well. If you’ll be piping Fergie off an iPhone or iPod, you’ll probably want a compatible speaker system.

Like anything in the audio world, the price tag on dedicated speaker systems for the iPhone or iPod can be surprisingly cheap ($30-40 bucks), or mind-blowingly expensive ($500+, like the Bose SoundDock 10). Most tend to work their way into a comfort zone of $129-$159.99 – and at an MSRP of $149.99, that’s exactly where you’ll find the Klipsch iGroove SXT. Originally released in 2007, the SXT has just been re-released with improved sound quality and compatibility with the latest iPhones and iPods. It’s not perfect, but with dual 2.5-inch subwoofers, it packs a good amount of boom for your buck.

Features:

• Dual 2.5-inch woofers in ported enclosure and dual 0.75-inch horn-loaded tweeters
• Features 3.5-mm auxiliary input
• Remote Control

Pros:

• The sound quality matches the price perfectly. It’s not going to blow away $200+ systems – but of any speaker I’ve heard under $150, this one takes the cake
• It looks great
• S-Video output for video/slideshow playback on compatible iPods

Cons:

• No volume indicator
• No FM radio

Review:

There I was in the kitchen, still rockin’ my pajama pants from the night before. Half a dozen eggs were left in the carton, the pan was just beginning to smoke, and the Klipsch SXT was just begging for me to hit the play button. I shot the go-ahead signal across the room with the remote control right as the first egg splashed down.

Listen up ya’ll, cause this is it. The beat that I’m banging is de-lic-ious.

Yep! I was listening to Fergie. Do I like Fergie? Oh hells nah. In fact, she drives me absolutely bat shit insane – but that’s exactly why I’d picked her for this test. If a stereo could make Fergie’s sinus-backed voice sound good, I’d give it a thumbs up. And sure enough, Fergie sounded pretty damn good. The sound was filling the room better than I’d expected out of the tiny box, with a decent amount of bass pounding out of the dual 2.5″ subs.

I dug around for a few speaker systems for the sake of comparison, and, from a sound quality standpoint, the Klipsch SXT seems to fit exactly where they’ve priced it. It blows away the $80-$90 iHome clock radios we had laying around the office, and sounds quite a bit better than the almost identically priced JBL On Stage 200ID. It fell a bit short against the JBL On Stage 400 series — but considering that that 400 series costs nearly $100 more, that’s pretty much what was expected.

Dedicated iPod speakers tend to be ugly chunks of black plastic, but that’s not the case here. The SXT is essentially one big glorious speaker grill, accented with a bit of silver plastic around the edges. It manages to be color neutral without looking cheap, so it ought to fit well in just about any room you throw it in.

Snap back to the kitchen – pajama pants, eggs, etc. No one was home (and thus, no one was around to make fun of my music selection) – might as well crank it up, right? I hit the volume up button – it got louder. I hit it again – it got louder again. So far, so good. The volume level was hurts-so-good loud at this point, but there wasn’t even a hint of distortion yet. I hit the button again and… nothing. I’d capped out the volume, but had no way of knowing as there isn’t any sort of volume indicator.

There also isn’t any FM radio. Considering that most people would presumably use this in rooms where they don’t otherwise have an audio system — and that it’s almost standard amongst lower-end systems — this is a bit disappointing. Alas, FM radio almost always gets abandoned once the price tag goes up, presumably because FM radio is the last thing you want (besides AM radio) when you want to be pushing quality sound.

If you’re looking for an iPod/iPhone speaker set that smokes the sub-$100 sets and the majority of stuff available around the same $150 price tag, the Klipsch iGroove SXT ought to fit the bill.

Product Page

Twin aluminum cylinders belt out a huge sound.

(Credit: Steve Guttenberg)

The Rocky Mountain Audio Fest 2009, held last week in Denver, showcased the best and brightest in high-end audio gear.

Hundreds of high-end manufacturers, from tiny one-person operations all the way up to industry giants like JBL were on hand. RMAF has a very different vibe than the Consumer Electronics Show held in Las Vegas every January–RMAF is a more grassroots affair.

I never heard of RAAL, a company based in Serbia, but its small (I’m guessing 7-inch-tall) speakers, produced a huge, room-filling sound. The speakers totally disappeared as sound sources.

The speaker uses twin aluminum cylinders, with 4-inch drivers firing up and down and a special “ribbon tweeter” sandwiched between the two cylinders, firing front and rear. Each speaker has its own, separate woofer, housed in another tube with 6-inch woofers at each end.

It’s a fully powered system; just hook up a source such as a CD player and you’re good to go. Price and availability weren’t announced, but the company is hoping the complete system will cost around $4,000.

TAD speakers and Bel Canto electronics sang ever so sweetly together.

(Credit: Steve Guttenberg)

TAD (a division of Pioneer Electronics) had the best sound I heard at RMAF. Their newly revised Reference One speaker ($60,000 per pair) was far from the most expensive speaker in Denver, but the 330-pound towers produced the most vivid, clear, and transparent sound. Bass drums were tight, pitch-perfect; stereo imaging was, again, remarkably precise and three-dimensional. Vocalists virtually materialized between the two Reference Ones.

Some of that amazing sound quality has to be attributed to the Bel Canto electronics that TAD was using. The compact e.One Series components use just a tiny fraction of the AC power consumed by their hotter running, bigger and heftier competition. Bel Canto does things differently.

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Originally posted at The Audiophiliac

Here’s what appears to be a decent iPod dock with an LCD remote that’s priced at just a little over a hundred bucks.

Today only, Amazon’s taken almost $80 off the price of the Philips DLO iBoom — $109 with free shipping, down from the regular price of $187.69.

You get a helmet-shaped speaker/dock combo that recharges your iPod and pushes sound out of a pair of 1-inch tweeters and 3-inch woofers.

The real draw here, though, is the remote control with built-in color LCD screen. It works up to 75 feet away and displays album art and artist info — looks pretty nice. There’s also a line-in jack for hooking up non-iPod players, though that’ll render the remote control useless aside from controlling the volume.

DLO iBoom JukeBox Speaker System for iPod [Amazon.com]

This is one pair of Ultimates!

(Credit: Transmission Audio)

High-end audio prices are getting crazy lately, but this $1,000,000 speaker–the Ultimate–may be the most expensive speaker in the world.

Please understand that $1,000,000 buys one speaker, so you’ll need to shell out $2,000,000 for stereo, and at least five million for your Ultimate home theater.

The Ultimate is a rather large speaker–each one consists of six, seven-foot tall panels. Each Ultimate houses a total of forty 15-inch subwoofers, twenty-four 8-inch woofers, and massive arrays of 2-inch wide and 1-inch wide ribbon tweeters. All of this is for a single channel/speaker, double those numbers for stereo! A pair of Ultimates are nearly forty feet wide!

That pretty much rules out my chances of getting the Ultimate for review in my Brooklyn apartment, oh well.

Each Ultimate speaker comes with its own power amplifiers, with an output of 31,000 watts, and the manufacturer claims the Ultimate can generate up to 146dB SPL, that’s a lot louder than a jet plane taking off. And just because it can play that loud, doesn’t mean it has to. Just because a Ferrari can go 200 mph, doesn’t mean it can’t cruise at 55.

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Originally posted at The Audiophiliac