Bose SoundDock Digital Music System
By Peter Sugarman
Last year, I was getting ready to move from Virginia to Utah. I'd been living in the woods for about eighteen years, and had been an acquisitive fella all that time. I had gathered a lot of music CDs. I had shelves full of spinning storage units. CDs took over the closets, spread out through the living room, and the guest room, some even made it out to the '57 Sou'wester Trailer I used for my office. Lots of CDs, and just about always, one of them was playing quietly in the background.
Moving ones kit and caboodle some 2,200 miles calls for a checklist life, and the time was fast approaching when I'd have to pack up all those little silver discs and the stereo that played them. Was I going to spend my last Virginia days with no music? Unacceptable. I needed something small, something I could toss in the trunk, but something with a deep library of sounds. Happily, I'd begun to live the iPod life. I had an iPod Photo loaded up with three weeks worth of tunes. All I needed was in-room playback.
Enter the Bose SoundDock Digital Music System (US$300). I'd long admired the cool, simple styling of the unit. About a foot wide and seven inches tall, it presents a pleasant light gray, curving speaker and a little platform centered in front. That's where you dock your iPod, any iPod (except the Shuffles). Bose provides adapters so different models can be docked.
So, what you get for $300 is a speaker, a little stage to show off your iPod friend, and some power cords with an industrial-size power converter. Plug the iPod in, and the SoundDock charges it up. The only visible controls on the unit are two volume controls: quiet on the left, loud on the right. The real controller is on a small remote. From anywhere in the room, you can Play/Pause, Skip (or Search) Forward or Back, adjust the volume, or turn the unit on/off. For menu navigation, you have to pick up your iPod and work with it in your palm, as Jobs intended.
I was delighted with the out of box experience, the object value, and (getting to the heart of the matter) the sound. This small unit fills the room, sometimes alarmingly loud when my lovely wife wants to get her groove on. I don't understand how so much clean volume comes out of such a small machine. Not everybody loves Bose sound, but I do. These folks and their audio products have been satisfying me for decades.
Even with all the things that please me, living with this technology brought me something more. I've always been fond of random choice. Back when I worked with Gareth on Beyond Cyberpunk, I built a random engine to drive that puppy, so the experience of reading our little information contraption was a bit different every time. Same as it ever was, I've fallen in love with iPod's "Shuffle Songs" mode. I don't know why it never engaged me before the SoundDock. I realized that all I had to do was choose "Shuffle Songs" and I could leave the iPod alone. I walk into the room, hit a single button on the remote: Play. Phone rings? I hit Pause. It's like one-click shopping, one of those happy confluences of technology and design, when one's life gets simpler and better all at once.
So, even though all those boxes of CDs have made their 2,200 mile journey, and now take over a solid wall of the office and much of the mud room, most often it's the SoundDock that gets played. It's one-click living, with a random DJ who almost always knows what tunes to serve up. Even though I've often appeared as Mr. Cranky here at Street Tech, this is one time when technology does not suck. The SoundDock is a happy-making machine, one that will serve you well.
Gareth Branwyn -[Wednesday, April 18, 2007]
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