Everyone has a guilty pleasure – a song, food, or hobby you enjoy, but feel like you have to justify to others. Brookstone’s SongPlay Music System for iPod ($150) is one of our guilty pleasures. In sound quality, it’s about par for course in bang for the buck, but a novel aesthetic design helps it transcend the masses of boring speakers we review week in and week out at iLounge.
We tend to love seeing the iPod at the center of circular speaker dock designs—JBL’s On Stage pioneered this on the horizontal axis, and its On Time and Radial went further and better with vertical enclosures. Brookstone’s SongPlay, which was perhaps coincidentally originally named “OnStage,” and only recently renamed, is somewhere in between these products visually.
In truth, it looks better in person than our photos suggest, mostly because of the angle it’s designed to sit on.
Viewed from the front, it looks like a half-globe with a metal front grille and a centrally suspended iPod dock; its sides and back reveal it to be more of a tapered tube shape with bowling ball-like vents in the rear. Like the higher-end JBL designs, it elevates the iPod to almost iconic status with a cute twist: a light behind the iPod dock illuminates its rear for dramatic effect, and can be turned up or down in intensity with an included remote control as you prefer.
Brookstone has also given more than a little thought to clean iPod shuffle integration. With an included minijack cable and seven Dock Adapters – six apparently official Apple parts, one custom-made – you can use it with the iPod shuffle or any Dock Connecting iPod you own. Unlike most speakers, the shuffle connects to an audio port on SongPlay’s front, under the dock, so you don’t have to wind a cable around the system’s back. Under the rear bowling ball-style vents, you’ll see RCA-style audio outputs and a power input, nothing else.
That’s SongPlay in a nutshell.
It looks cool sitting on a desk – arguably cooler than the average $150 iPod speaker system – and doesn’t have any secrets or other frills. There isn’t a battery compartment for portability. Other than its speaker light control and mute button, the nine-button Infrared remote control is unremarkable except for its larger than average size. And the system doesn’t offer any special audio enhancement features, bass, treble, faux 3-D surround sound, or otherwise. It’s basically what Oregon Scientific’s iBall could have been, in a practically stripped down form.
As suggested above, the sound quality is acceptable, not mindblowing.
