A device evolution: Darwinian adaptation of the boombox… and a few thoughts on what’s fit

Do you recognize the modern day personal audio system? At their most familiar, it looks an awful lot like a 2.1 PC speaker system and a funny looking docking port. Or some brick with a funny looking docking port on top. What’s the story?

For table-top or bookshelf audio, and boomboxing, the landscape has clearly changed in the last few years. If you have any doubt, go stroll through the most crowded isles at Best Buy, Costco, Target, Wal-Mart, and even some of the more visible display cases at home A/V dealers in your area like Myer Emco (DC-Metro), Tweeter (Northeast), Magnolia (West Coast), Hawthorne(Seattle). You’ll see a few of the likely suspects from Bose, iHome, Altec Lansing, and Apple which have done the lions share in reshaping how we’re to think about rendering our audio at home.

The speaker-dock market, as I’ll refer to it, is exploding. Naturally, we have Apple’s iPod to thank for this. I dunno how many people realise it, but portable audio players, themselves, have become the de facto portable audio storage medium. I dunno if people associate their iPod with the Sony Walkman or with the cassette tape? With the Discman or the CD?

Media formats have determined the shape of personal audio systems for years — vinyl record turn-tables, cassette decks and Walkmans, laserdisc players, CD players & discman, MD players, … and so now naturally, with music being stored on harddrives and flashdrives, right before our eyes, we are witnessing “device-evolution.” It’s pretty cool if you think about it. Device form factors are adapting to a disruption in media formats. Home audio rendering devices have to pull source material from a wide variety of shapes, sizes, and interfaces as portable audio player makers build on-the-go devices that are so smart and handy, they beg to be used at home as well.

The success of these device markets rely on network affects. In the past, standards (like CD, VHS, 8-track) helped de-risk the proposition for makers of rendering devices. Of course, the market-share leader, Apple, has benefitted from the a positive network effect. Mostly to date, speaker manufacturers have only dared to enter the market with speaker-docks aimed at the iPod. Apple promotes a decent interface spec, and leaves the rest of the enticement being their enormous installed base of iPods they’ve been busy creating year after year.

But now, this will change. Consumers who aren’t shackled to the iPod ecosystem as of yet, can increasingly see speaker-dock options available for their “esoteric” players.

Creative’s take on $300-500 speaker dock was announced recently. See the Engadget article that gives a brief intro to the X-Fi Z600 and a couple lower-end counterparts, one, the TravelSound Zen V that is specifically for the Zen V player.

Altec just launched the first speaker dock for the Zune (pictured above). VAF also chipped in to the game with the Octavio 1, a system I am personally dying to hear.

Some of these speaker-docks do a decent job punching out audio to fill one or two rooms. If you’re willing to spend a couple hundred bucks, minimum.

My bone picking…

I am still troubled by one key issue with all these products. How can I efficiently navigate my music, add to playlists, control playback, and view the displays on these players while they are sitting up on their speakers half way across the room??? This is a huge user interface lapse in my opinion. There are remotes out there for some of these systems, but they have limited playlist selection capabilities. They merely allow you to control audio playback that is already occuring. Already, I have grown accustomed to the GUI of my iPod, why can’t I use it at home just like I do when I am on-the-go?

The current solution just doesn’t quite do it for me. I think there should be a better way, which is why I’ve held off an any personal commitments to current speaker-dock offerings. Aesthetics be damned, my Yamaha 600W Receiver, and 50 ft miniplug-to-RCA extension cord will work just fine for now.