The iPod Hi-Fi is a high quality and small form factor speaker system developed and sold by Apple inc. Though promised to deliver very high quality sound output and crystal clear sound transport, the iPod Hi-Fi failed to keep up with its promise with the audiophile community and was thus discontinued from late 2007, paving the way for the better designed and cheaper speaker systems that had similar but well prepared features of the iPod Hi-Fi. Though the iPod Hi-Fi had many distinct features such as a dedicated iPod dock, very loud sound, small size and trademark apple minimalism, it was far behind competition with its basic audio output.
Although marketed as a home stereo system, the diminutive iPod Hi-Fi was expensive at $349. Made to be the thumping core of a party, the Hi-Fi performed well as a short term party going teen’s friend, with the ability of just switching the iPods on it and blasting songs out of the speakers. This being the major marketing paradigm, was lost when the price itself was out of reach of many teenagers and other people, who preferred the audio through headphones or 3.5mm jack stereo speakers instead of buying a separate system from Apple and blasting their houses with the music.
The iPod Hi-Fi was the target of a lot of criticism since the day of its display by apple co founder Steve Jobs. It was found to be relatively louder than the iBoom or Bose corp.’s SoundDock system, but delivered a glaring lack in clarity when it came to frequency response with frequencies greater than ~17KHz due to a fault with Apple’s manufacturing itself. Due to this, the depth of sound and imaging is drastically lost when frequencies of this magnitude are met, clearly debilitating its worth as a “hi-fi” stereo system.
Since the speakers themselves are placed very close to each other, true stereo playback is distorted due to diffuse interference from both the speakers, thus rendering the central cone as distorted. Due to the linear arrangement of drivers in the front panel, sound quality also suffers heavily. Reverberations are monotonously flat sometimes due to these same engineering errors, and thus the true trend of hi-fi was lost somewhere to these selfsame errors. Audiophiles complained about this lack of enhanced features that was supposed to be there on these systems, and thus Apple discontinued this speaker set in September of 2007.
