The latest generation of Apple’s iPods such as the iPod Touch has wireless capabilities. You can thus stream music via Airplay, WiFi and Bluetooth simply by downloading an appropriate app. However, there are only a few wireless speakers on the market that support Airplay and WiFi. Bluetooth speakers are more common but Bluetooth has a fairly limited range. Fortunately there are some iPod docks on the market that can stream audio for a longer distance. In this post I will take a quick look at some of these docks.
Sonos has release a dock last year which supports its own proprietary wireless protocol. This dock accepts an iPod and iPad. What’s neat about the Sonos ipod dock is that the data is extracted from the iPod which means that there is no quality loos due to DA conversion. This extraction is not trivial since Apple does not officially support it. We have not tested whether these docks work with the 5th generation iPods.
The Amphony dock incorporates its own proprietary transmitter circuitry which works with its line of iFinity products. There are currently only two products available that can receive the wireless signal: the iFinity line of wireless speakers and the iFinity line-level receivers. We’ll have to wait to find out whether there will be more products available in the future.
There are also some miniature transmitters available that plug into the docking connector. These transmitters are not an iPod dock per say but have similar functionality. The main purpose of these transmitters is to share the music amongst multiple users. Each user wears headphones which are plugged into a wireless receiver unit. Both the transmitter and receiver are powered by batteries. Bluetooth headsets are an alternative for this application since the newest iPods can stream music via Bluetooth. However, Bluetooth usually is limited to one headset. Thus for multiple users to share the same music you’ll need one of those transmitter products.
