Large room - will a docking station work?
I have a large open plan living room (about 30 ft x 25 ft) and was looking at getting a docking station for my i-pod classic 80gb. I am not a hi-fi nut - I just want enough sound to fill the room. Will a dock work, and if so which one? I have been looking at the klipsch sxt and the bose sound dock. As a female I am finding it impossible to get a decent answer out of any shops and my husband is a disinterested technophobe. Any advice would be welcome.
It depends what you mean by fill the room. A decent sound dock will fill the room with sound, but not like a full size hifi with speakers. The latter will always be able to go louder and with a larger scale of sound caused by the speakers being separate. If you really just want enough sound then I can recommend the Bose. My room is 21' by 14' and the Bose goes loud enough without distorting the sound that my wife worries we annoy the neighbours (they have never complained) and you have to raise your voice but not shout to be heard. It has strong base, a characteristic of Bose which also helps room filling. Bose also offers home trials, though I have no experience of how well this works.
However, the bottom line is that no sound dock will fill a room like plugging your ipod into a separate or even non separate hifi system.
Hm yeah, that's a very big room, I think you'll struggle. But as stated above, one (wo)man's "room-filling" is another's "wasp in a jam jar".
You would be better with a hifi amp and speakers. But with regards to docks, Most of the ones I've heard have been pretty awful. The Bose sound dock was ok, but not exactly hifi sounding although very compact and unobtrusive. I recently saw a group test on the Gadget Show on channel five. The test winner was the new B&W Zeppelin it's £399, haven't seen it any cheaper than that. It looks a nice piece of kit.
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There's no way a docking station will fill that room at loud levels without going into serious distortion.