Wireless Audio done right.

With an open mind, I introduced the Sony wireless speakers to my wife. I explained that they were a complete bargain, and that if we didn't want them, I could probably re-sell them to someone at work. She was quite keen to get some music back into the living room. Our DVD player, which was used to play CDs, has migrated to another room, and music on a MacBook's speakers is obviously compromised.

After a quick demo, while she was out of the house earlier, I started to set them up properly. As I was setting them up, I discovered that our Airport Express, which I'd bought to augment a dead spot right where my wife sits on the couch, was now very close to our AV cupboard. My son had moved it a little while back.

Rather than plug in the Sony kit, I figured I might be able to hook up the Airport Express. We've a bit of an unconventional setup. Virgin V+ and Sky boxes hooked up to an old Phillips video sender, which is routed to Aego-M 2.1 speakers (fantastic) and an NEC projector (feeling its age now), which projects straight onto the living room wall, giving us a 70" picture. If the video sender is transmitting, it kills WiFi, so it's just used to switch sources. it has 4 in and 1 out, so here were 2 spare inputs.

A quick nose through my boxes of cables and connectors yielded a SCART to Phono converter (the kind you get with a PS2 or a Wii) and a 3.5mm jack to Phono cable. Perfect. I hooked it up, fired up iTunes on my MacBook Pro, the Remote App on my iPod Touch, paired them, and had audio out of the Aegos straight away.

I did briefly have a problem with Remote losing the ability to connect to iTunes. The settings were correct. The interwebs suggested a firewall problem. My firewall settings were fine, but something was screwing up with it. I switched the firewall off, reconnected, and turned the firewall on again, and it's been fine ever since.

The Remote app is brilliant. Fantastic. It can switch between multiple libraries, and it can re-route audio to either the Mac's speakers or the Airport connected speakers (or both). It's also far faster than I'd expect. I have a fairly large library (12,000+ songs), and it takes seconds to connect, seearch etc. It's as though the library is on the iPod.

This is how it's meant to be. The Sony system goes back on Monday. Turns out an 83% discount doesn't matter if the product is fundamentally flawed. Docking an iPod touch or an iPhone takes it out of your hand, and that's just wrong.

People accuse me of fanboyism, but it's only partly true. Apple generally make stuff that's better than everyone else, but often it's just because it sucks less than everyone else rather than being phenomenally good. iTunes + Airport Express + Remote is an example of phenomenally good.
but they absolutely nailed this.

With Airplay coming to third party devices, this is only going to get better.

A disappointing bargain

Yesterday I bought a Sony AIR-SA20PK Multi-Room Wireless speaker system. I got it back to my mid-week digs, unboxed it, and gave it a quick trial. Maybe 10 minutes. It has such significant flaws that I'm currently considering the purchase a mistake.

When you buy a £300 gadget for £50, and it still disappoints, it's no surprise to discover that it's discontinued product.

Brief explanation of the system. There are three boxes. Two are remote speakers, the other is a base unit, which is a combined iPod Dock, FM Radio and Digital Audio Transmitter. Each speaker can play they audio of the iPod or radio independently. The base unit can also be connected to an amplifier or TV with phono connectors for L/R audio and composite video. Think of it as Sonos Lite.

Before I explain what's wrong with it, reasons to be cheerful:

I'd been looking for a simple iPod Dock that would connect to my amp and would charge the iPod from the mains. The Apple Universal Dock is £39. It needs USB power, so is dead to me, but it gives me a reference price. The Dock/Transmitter part of the Sony Air system plugs into the mains (with a ludicrously big tethered wall wart) and has phono connectors for some iPod-to-amp goodness.

I probably wouldn't have paid £50 just for something that only did this, but nevertheless, it solves my problem.

In a quick test, in one room, with one receiver about 3 foot from the dock and the other about 20ft from the dock, everything paired quickly and sounded good. Not enough bass said fellow lodger, but I'm middle aged and urbane and he's young and urban. It sounded well rounded considering the size of the units. They're about the size of a kitchen radio, but twice as deep.

And now the bad…

The FM radio audio cannot be routed to the L/R phono output of the base unit. There's no switch, those outputs are hard-wired for the iPod only. The radio can only play through the bundled speakers.

I've tested briefly with an iPhone. It doesn't work. My hypothesis is that the base unit's wireless signal and the 3G of an iPhone interfere with each other, or perhaps getting approval for connectivity with an iPhone is harder and more expensive than for a mere iPod.

I've also read that the new retina display iPods aren't compatible for some reason, but can't confirm.

Setting up was really easy, but actually putting the iPod into the dock and picking up the Sony remote was an "Oh Noes!" moment. It just immediately felt all wrong. "What have I done?", I thought, as a superb visual interface was replaced with a play/pause/prev/next remote. The fact that the iPod needs to be in the dock while it's in use is a bit of a disaster. While charging overnight is fair enough, (REMINDER:Check that the iPod charges while the base unit is in standby mode), but not using the iPod's interface for navigation is simply an epic fail.

I've yet to test the range or whether WiFi suffers while the base unit is on. Experience with an analogue video sender was that it totally screwed with our WiFi, no matter what channels were in use. The Sony may turn out to be fine in this respect, but the proper solution is to use Wifi or Bluetooth. Proprietary wireless is really just asking for trouble.

There are no auxiliary inputs on the base unit. This is madness. It means that no audio, other than from a supported iPod, can be used with the system. If the 4th generation iPod Touch incompatibility is true, it means that this system became obsolete inside about 2 years. Break/Lose your iPod and your multi-room audio just broke forever.

There are no auxiliary inputs on the remote speakers. This is also madness. There should be a line in on both of the remote speakers so that any other source can be used with them. Currently, if the transmitter breaks, the remote speakers die with it.

Note: A colleague has pointed out that other S-Air transmitters are available, even if this one is discontinued. He also suggested that the reason for not having aux inputs is that it obviates the need for A/D converters, making the units cheaper to produce.

It's really doesn't feel like a £300 product. Amp plus speakers plus Apple Remote on the iPod plus iTunes plus Airport Express. That's a better solution. I'd still need that dock though, and all of that would be a lot more than £50.

Obama's religion

I can't remember what I was discussing with a friend of mine last night, but it led me to say "Obama probably isn't a Christian".

My friend looked at me as though I was mad. As though I'd said something deeply offensive.

"What do you mean ?", he demanded.

I looked puzzled at his reaction, and replied, "Well, he's an intelligent man. He's more likely to be a closet atheist. He'd be unelectable if he didn't do the whole Christian thing"

He relaxed.

"Oh. Thank fuck for that! For a moment I thought you'd gone mad and that you thought he was a Muslim!"

Oh how we laughed. For quite a long time.

Interestingly, I read this today. I may have to revise my opinion, but my experience suggests that most Christians are either non-practising believers, or practising-non-believers.

'Bland Recognition'

I hereby lay claim to the term 'Bland Recognition', first used on Twitter, in relation to the erosion of variety and creativity in advertising, architecture, society, products.

It's what you feel when you find yourself in clone town.

The iPod Nano (the crap one)

I've not tried one, but initial impressions aren't good. It looks ugly. A touch interface feels inappropriate with such a small screen.

All of the 'but for a little bit more, you can get an iPod Touch' harping, though, just reminds me of when the iPod mini was introduced, and people all said it was stupid to save a few quid when a full sized iPod has way more storage.

I think if this nano fails, it won't have anything to do with price/features, it'll be because it's a bit ugly, and difficult to use.

The new iPod nano is a fifth of the weight of the new iPod Touch. (≃20g vs ≃100g)

The new iPod Touch is almost five times the volume of the new iPod Nano. (2.8 cubic inches versus 0.6 cubic inches)

I guess the iPod Nano is the gym iPod. It's small and light and has a clip. As such it's certainly more niche. I'd expect far fewer sales of iPod Nanos versus iPod Touch, but that doesn't mean it's failed, it just indicates how the market has segmented.

Hywel's Law

The grammatical correctness of an email request for tech support is inversely proportional to the stupidity of the question therein.

That is all.

Tefal Quick Cup

A year or two ago, our kettle broke. We got a Tefal Quick Cup to replace it. Just the right amount of water is heated as it passes through an element, meaning you only heat the water you need. It also dispenses cool filtered water. What's not to like ?

What's not to like:

1. The 'cool' water is room temperature, which is hardly cool on a hot day. If you want cool filtered water, get a water filter jug and keep it in the fridge. If you want cool water, get it from the tap.

2. 'Cool' water remains in the pipe/element until the next time you use it. This means that you get a small amount of cold water in your cup. The workaround is to start the hot water for a second, stop it, empty the tepid water into the sink and then start making a drink. If you forget to do this it makes instant black coffee even more disgusting than it normally is, and white coffee undrinkable. Tea is a disaster. Coffee in a cafetière is just about OK, except ours doesn't fit under the Quick Cup's spout easily.

3. Tea is a disaster. Boiling water plus teabag in a mug may be against the law, but it's how most people make tea these days. While it's not as nice as making it in a warmed pot with a little patience, it'll make a fairly decent cuppa. WARNING! DO NOT MAKE TEA WITH A TEFAL QUICK CUP! No. Seriously. Don't do it. It'll be like American tea, where you get cup of warm water and a teabag on the side.

4. You'll need a kettle anyway. Being impatient, we ended up buying a cheap kettle anyway, for boiling water to make pasta etc. Turns out it's good for tea as well.

5. It feels more inconvenient. If you're making one cup or two, it's probably better. Making four or six or eight makes you feel like a galley slave. Worse though, is that it engenders an entitlement to instant gratification. Whereas with a kettle, it's automatic to fill it to a desired level as you put it on, with the TQC, it's automatic just to hit the button. Fine if the reservoir is full, but SO UNFAIR if, mid cup, it starts spitting out steam and coughing.

6. It dispenses a set amount of water. This is mostly a convenience. Press once, get a mug full of water. Not all of our mugs are the same capacity, so some get dangerously full and others pique the pessimist in me and seem half empty.

7. It dispenses a set amount of water, but with no intelligence, and it encourages a lack of attention from the user. Press the button a second time, and it stops. Press it again and it'll yield a whole mug's worth again. Usually not a problem, but if the reservoir runs dry, and you're forced ALL THE WAY across the kitchen to fill it up, when you poke that button, you get a full cup's worth. If you're not paying attention, that could be half a cup's worth of dilute coffee all over the work surface.

8. It dispenses a set amount of water. See 4 and 5.


In summary, this is what it's good at:

1. Instant black coffee, as long as you remember to purge the spout.

This is what it's bad at:

2. Everything else.

Buy a kettle instead.