As soon as you get your hand on an
iP1, the first thing you will probably do is crank it up and express surprise at how good the thing sounds – and then you'll realize that what you paid for it now seems like a bargain. The next thing you probably
won't do is crack it open to see what's inside.
At Avnera, almost 2 years ago now, we were sitting around thinking of what kind of splash to make with our
SpeakerMagic product line. You see, we were discovering all kinds of goodness that our designers packed inside the amplifier circuits... this chip could go to eleven! Rock on. So as test board after test board spilled out of the lab incrementally proving the ever-increasing power capabilities of the digital stereo input, 4 channel Class-D output amplifier, us marketing dudes got pretty excited. The first SpeakerMagic IC was geared to enable iPod speakerdocks that delivered true HiFi sound quality. Realizing its potential was a goal set for CES in Jan 2008. Code-named Hendrix, I spec'd and commissioned the world's first 100W iPod speakerdock. Dressed in gaudy eye-catching form factor, with yellow drivers, and Madonna-like teets-née-bass-ports at the rear, this thing was meant to attract a stare... and then deliver on its visual promise with serious audio punch. That it did. In fact, it pushed the 130W barrier. SpeakerMagic was inside accepting digital stereo input, adding voicing and spatial sweetness with an integrated floating-point DSP, as well as sub-dividing the stereo signal with active crossovers into a 2+2 stereo signal, to pass on 4 channels of soon to be bi-amplified stereo output via Avnera's patented class-D technology. We delivered near 96 dB SNR (i.e. better than the iPod itself), and 0.006% THD+N. Hendrix was pretty kick-ass. Our acoustics design partner also did a good job designing a rock solid cabinet and able drivers for the tweeters and woofers. Hendrix was a pioneer in the dock world. In addition to sounding good, it also had to be iPhone ready, so very robust against GSM noise... check. And it had to be affordable, i.e. cheaper than a Bose Soundock at retail... check, again.
Like all good reference designs, they are about as profitable as the toilet in the back office, unless they find their hosted electronics a horse to get them to market for consumers to enjoy.
Enter
iHome. At CES, they heard, they loved it, their designers took the reigns and crafted a gorgeous if not somewhat polarizing industrial design. Talk about "by-design." The iP1 is attractive, eye-catching, classy, polarizing, minimalist, elegant... by-design. For iHome it was a new thing designing a system for the power-levels they chose to go to market with... 100Watts! Awesome. No product marketing numbing-dumbing here. The heart and soul of Hendrix is alive and well in the iP1. In fact the only difference is Hendrix's 5" drivers were downsized to 4", but they stepped up the throw, the robustness, and general quality of the drivers to compensate. This was a very practical consideration to make the product fit on retailers' shelves. You will see the dock soon at two very major retailers, and it will be clear that size does matter in these spaces. Thankfully it was handled judiciously, and in all honesty, fixed a requirements miss-step we should have considered when Hendrix was conceived at Avnera.
iHome leveraged the floating point DSP inside the SpeakerMagic IC, and ported
Bongiovi's dynamic, real-time "Digital Power Station" equalization algorithm to create a uniquely qualified piece. Bongiovi DPS (as some reporting would mislead you to think) is not a simple loudness curve... it is content specific, real-time adaptive, and focused on boosting frequency response across the musical composition to better match an "out-of-the-studio" mastering profile. What happens to music in the digitization, distribution, and compression regimes is horribly destructive to tunes recorded in analog studios, or digital stuff that's post-processed to hell by less than able sound engineers. Bongiovi's patented algorithms seek to recover the mixing desk mastered quality... and you will particularly notice the benefits when you listen to classic material like Miles Davis, or Led Zeppelin, or yes... even Hendrix. It also happens to sound great on modern dance tracks and folk-infused pop music. So young and old music tastes will have some joy from pressing the B button. In all frankness, some tracks do sound perfect without Bongiovi turned on... so it will end up a matter of listening tastes and some learning about what sounds good to you and when. But on or off, the iP1 rocks 100 Watts of clean digital audio.
It also shows what iHome does really well. They really understand the iPhone and iPod user, and they provide them solutions that make the iPhone/iPod more useful and enjoyable when you aren't sporting the earphones – from the bedroom, to the listening room, to the hotel room.
The iHome Studio Series iP1 also happens to make sure the ad hoc, post-night-out after-parties and dorm-room pre-parties are well-amped. So for the first time with authority, iHome gives your iPod music collection the punch it's been waiting for... rock-on.
Friday, August 21, 2009 at 9:27AM 
