iHome AirPlay wireless speaker system is revealed on company teaser site

The iHome AirPlay wireless speaker teaser site is up. iHome has unveiled a completely new design for a completely new category of Apple audio accessory.

The picture and copy on the teaser site show a stereo all-in-one speaker design, with a metal base and black cloth grille. A capacitive touch panel on top rounds out the visible form-factor elements. The copy states that the speaker includes a rechargeable battery, which if you let your imagination run with it, means you can achieve a completely wireless listening experience using AirPlay, no strings attached.

AirPlay speakers will allow point-to-multipoint streaming of content from any iTunes 10 (or later) library running on Mac or Windows operating systems. As Apple mentioned on Wednesday, AirPlay functionality will also extend to the iPad, and presumably all iOS devices, when iOS 4.2 is released at the end of 2010. So users could stream audio directly from iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad to an AirPlay speaker.

AirPlay is the new name for AirTunes, the wireless audio technology that has been used for the past five-plus years by Apple to stream audio from iTunes to the Airport Express and Apple TV. Audio is streamed using Apple Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC), meaning whatever format your audio is stored in within iTunes, if iTunes can play such a file, than it can send it via AirPlay, after it is "transcoded" to ALAC. Since ALAC is "lossless," it transmits the audio without any additional degradation, or music data loss, compared to the source file.

For the first time, this wireless audio functionality is now available to Apple's third-party licensed accessory makers, and iHome is one of these, being one of the most prolific in the space over the last five years.

Comments

[gerhard]

Hi Micah

Do you know when these speakers will be available? They are exactly what I'm looking for.

Thanks

[Pearl]

hi thanks for the blog.

[Zinc]

Blog search is not restricted to the blog pages, I tried to search the wirelessaudioblog blogs and instead got pages and pages of product hits on Amazon. Search was useless for finding stuff on this site. Had to resort to google advanced search qualified by the site name, a pain from a mobile.