Product Reviews

If you're bored with the safe, angular designs of most iPod speaker kits around at the moment, then these two curvaceous speaker and dock combos from Scandyna might tickle your design funny bone.

Scandyna is a Danish company but the original pod speaker design was actually developed by a team of British engineers from high-end audio specialist Bowers and Wilkins. Scandyna licensed the design in 1996 and has since developed it into a broad line of speakers for home cinema set-ups, hi-fis and now iPod docks.

As their name suggests, the Micropods are the smaller of the two designs and are roughly the same size as a coconut. In contrast the Drop speakers take up much the same space as a typical bookshelf-type.

The build quality of both is superb. The housings are constructed from a thick ABS plastic and the glossy finish is absolutely first class. The Micropods use a tough 70mm Kevlar driver, backed up by a small 19mm tweeter for high-frequency sounds. The Drop, though, uses a much larger driver. It's a 125mm unit also of Kevlar construction and is twinned with a 25mm tweeter. Both offerings feature sturdy, metal speaker, rear terminals that can accept the banana plugs used on high-quality speaker cables.

The same dock is used no matter which set of speakers you choose. It differs from most on the market in that it has its own amp built-in that can pump 30 Watts of sound through the speakers. The dock is dome shaped and matches perfectly with the speakers, thanks to its glossy finish. However, although the speakers are available in a range of colours including black, white, red and blue, the dock is unfortunately offered only in black and white.

Setting it up is pretty straightforward.

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It comes with eight inserts, so you just choose the one that matches your iPod and slap it in place. Scandyna supplies heavy-duty cable to connect the dock to the speakers but as both strands are pure white, you have to pay attention to ensure you get the polarity right. A bit of tape at the end of each cable would have easily avoided this problem. Apart from the speaker terminals the only other connector on the dock is a mini-jack plug that can be used to hook up the optional subwoofer that Scandyna also sells.

There are no buttons on the dock, so everything has to be controlled via the remote, which unfortunately is disappointing. It's tiny, so it'll be easy to lose down the back of a sofa - and it uses cheap, nasty membrane buttons. It gives you only basic control over your iPod too. You can skip tracks, pause playback and turn repeat on or off but you can't use it to move through your iPod's menu system like you can on some rival models. There's also no video output or USB connector for syncing your iPod with your Mac while it's docked.

The two set-ups share a lot in common. Naturally as the Drop speakers are considerably larger than the Micropods they can pump out a bit more bass. This is especially noticeable on dance and rock tracks where the heavier bottom end adds a bit more meat to the sound.

As they use larger cones it means that they can also be driven harder and will easily pump out enough volume to fill a bigger-than-average room.

The Micropods by comparison are more suitable for smaller living rooms or a study. However, they're no slouch when it comes to their sonics. For such small speakers they pack a decent bottom-end punch and sound beautifully natural when playing back delicate material like acoustic tracks.

In short, both set-ups sound fantastic and are a cut above the average iPod dock. Which one you choose will really come down to the size of room you need to fill with sound. Of the two, we prefer the Micropod speakers because they look more elegant and have all the performance and volume that most people will need.

The fact that they're much more affordable than much of the opposition doesn't harm their case either.

However, we would have preferred a dock with more advanced features and with a much better remote control.