Krell intros the KID -- another expensive iPod dock you'll never buy
By Joshua Topolsky 
posted Jul 7th 2008 5:10PM
posted Jul 7th 2008 5:10PM
[Via Crave; Image courtesy Audio Junkies]
Please note: If you're a current Engadget commenter, you do not need to re-register. Simply login and you will be prompted to select a username.
I love the sarcasm.
Best part is that you'll have to drop another $2000 on speakers and $150 on quality speaker cables to take full advantage of the amplifier's awesome sound reproduction.
Correction: Quality speaker cable is inexpensive and called "Coat Hanger".
Indeed... all that high dollar equipment to play the crappy mp3 digital format...
I'll pass
lol, about the coat hanger is true but still i have some fond on golden connector.
Don't worry.. I'm sure Apple will bring out their own brand of cable.. the iHanger perhaps.
This is truly a ground breaking product. A fusion of Apple RDS and Audophile grade snake oil.
$2K speakers would not be a match for Krell equipment generally.
Keep heading upmarket. :P
Has anybody listened to it yet?. I know it sounds silly, but maybe they should try it first, even with a 128kbps track.
Hoohooooo, burn - Mr. Krell's not gonna like reading that 4-second review.
There is no Mr Krell. The designer's name is Dan D' Agostino.
Hah, nice.
-Taylor
I also find this nice.
-Shane
Yes, great.
-yode
hrm, *golf clap.
-eeevan
fantastic
-andres
Hm, I see what you all did there.
-fsx
Amazing
-your mother
Cool
-Benson
I love you engadget
-chris
Indeed (British Voice)
A Dissected goat.
C-C-C-C-COMBO BREAKER!!!
Theory:
As long as people will overpay for their mp3 player they will also probably over pay for its docking station.
Theory behind this product*
I'll bet a shiny Susan B. the subjectivist, high-end audio rags like Stereophile and The Absolute Sound will be fawing all over it.
A subjectawhat? Is that an SAT word for douche bag?
Who is these sorts of high-end docks targeted to?
Anybody who would spend four grand on a piece of sound equipment will also spend more than $200 on your piddly little music player. In fact, they probably eschew digital storage altogether.
You know that guy that rips around your town in a Porsche?
That guy...
YOUR MOM!!
This would be more akin to putting a Civic's engine into a Ferrari. Sure the Ferrari /could/ take a corner at how many ever Gs but the engine would never get it up to that speed.
Actually hard drives and other digital media (not optical) are shaping up to be the best storage devices for music.
http://www.wavelengthaudio.com/usbdac.html
http://www.scott-nixon.com/dac.htm
I use a DAC I built based on scott nixion's design for use with my PowerMac and Tube amplifier. Its really sweet.
I thought about building a DAC with an ipod dock. Its a great idea. Mine would cost about $200 in parts though. : )
I don't quite understand how to get the digital signal right off the ipod. My guess is they probably mount it as usb mass storage and then do the decoding and whatnot in-device.
Assuming no processing is done inside the ipod (analog conversion, normalization, etc), and the CDs are ripped lossless with buffering, this will sound as good or better than $10,000 CD players. With that in mind, its a bargain and you don't have to get up to change CDs. : )
Actually, I take that back. Since the music is right on the ipod screen, it can't be the mass-storage approach. The ipod itself must have an interface to grab the raw digital output, otherwise this device is bunk.
If you don't like CDs and want great sound, just get an mac mini (or your favorite tiny windows/linux machine) and a scott nixon dac. For under $1000, you will have something that rivals the most expensive CD gear available.
"... otherwise this device is bunk."
Yes, that pretty much covers it.
@reader
Nothing wrong with Civic engine. Mine runs smoothly.
Actually, quite a lot of 'audiophiles' use iPods. iPods actually use rather good hardware - and can be modded to use really good (read: expensive) hardware quite easily (there's a little cottage industry involved in doing this). And they can store lossless audio. If you read the audio geek forums like hydrogenaudio and head-fi, you'll see many people there have iPods loaded with lossless tracks.
So, what, you can get like 4 albums of lossless on an iPod Nano?
As long as you aren't trying to feed your HiFi from the headphone jack.... But can the dock send raw data that the Krell can D/A?
@Jim, don't be thick - 160GB Ipod Classic?
More than enough for over 100 lossless albums + loads of single tracks.
Most objective reviews(with professional sound engineers) using the same professional headphones always place the iPod low compared to Sony, Creative, Samsung, and Archos. In fact the iPod has a poor score for sound quality.
It might be fine for a crappy MP3 on the bus, but the sound quality is below many of the market rivals.
@Adam Williamson
Me and my wallet are sad to say that I know well these places that you speak of.
@mattclarkie
These test don't account for an ipod modded to have a proper line level audio out playing lossless audio, connected to a portable headphone amp that cost 3 times more than the ipod, in turn connected to a pair of headphone thats that cost 5 times more than the ipod.
Finally somebody has made a dock 100 times larger then the actual device its designed to support. These people are what we like to call visionaries!!!!
don't you mean... hearingaries?
@warrrennnnn
i just pissed myself
Can't you also put uncompressed WAV files on an ipod? at least, that's what I do with mine since my Shure E4c's cruelly point out the flaws in compressed audio.
sure, but what's doing the d to a converison? the ipod or the dock? I hope it's the dock...
I don't think the iPod has an unprocessed out does it? And IT-Accountant, you should Rockbox your iPod so you can use FLAC and get way more songs onto it.
sure, but why use uncompressed raw when apple lossless sounds as good at 1/4 the size? (lossless compression)
If you have a player that supports flac, that can do a little better and is open.
@ Daniel- Portability- you can't take your lossless Apple anywhere and play it on anything. My iPod is stuffed with .WAV files personally. Of course it also only has music from CDs I own too. :P
Krell has been going down in quality for quite a while now. Still good stuff, but c'mon, and iPod dock?
The KID has been out for months - it's the Papa Dock that has been recently released.
But i dont rip my cd's into 128 kb/s MP3s...
once this is in my rack, how do i dock my ipod?
thats what she said.
Lol @ sarcasm.....128kbps
Also lol @ the snappy RS-232 connection from 1981! Serail communications FTW!!
RS-232 is the preferred method of communication for home integration control processors. Most A/V products that are likely to be connected to a Crestron system (or the like) will have RS-232.
Thank you Mr Wiki, now go get a fuckin job!
Mr. Ignorant,
Strangely enough, I work for a prominent high-end audio shop... funny how that works, eh?
Yours Truly,
Mr. Wiki
Mr wiki,
Grats?
Sincerely,
Mr Ignorant
.
Geek wars. How entertaining.
my calculator can calculate more calculations than your calculator.
So true LOL. Kids these days don't even understand the loss of quality in music from MP3's and capped online stores.
To their credit, you have to applaud the brushed aluminum finish, oversized brand engraving, and generous use of rivets.....nobody does that anymore.
It looks like it should have a giant volume knob with a subtle tactile response. Hey, they forgot it comes with an iTunes gift card for a free download of Hall & Oates' 1980 classic album 'Voices'.
Well played, engadget :)
i use this this in my $50,000 speakers connected with coat hangars
Joshua Topolsky - You have a unique gift for writing in a way that grabs the essence of the absurdity of this product! Well done.
Apple lossless, I think is might even still play WAVs?
Best Engadget Post? yes, no?
Tube amps and phonographs are the ONLY way to go. Down with digital, viva la analog!
And yes, it may be the best Engadget post yet!
Not many people would buy this to listen to mp3s. The iPod also stores and outputs uncrompressed .wav data. While the Krell KID doesn't offload the DAC function from the iPod, it does take over all the analog line stage after the DAC giving you high quality differential outputs and a decent volume control. The Papa dock is what the KID itself docks into, and its basically a power amplifier. Nothing revolutionary except for the nesting form factor.
The remaining weak link of course is the iPod's DAC, but at least the iPod's output buffer circutiry is bypassed. I imagine the sound quality would be comparable to a similarly priced CD player + Integrated.
For those people who think paying more than $35 for a CD player is pointless, feel free to ignore this post completely.
So what you're telling me is that this is a glorified iMod? Wadia has a solution that pulls bits and allows for an external DAC of your choice.
I agree, not many people would buy this.
And, think of all the time, energy and natural resources they wasted to create such an overpriced .mp3 dock that no one will ever buy.
LAME!
Faslane
one hell of a good sarcasm...
$4000 for that?
Why are they calling this the "Papa Dock"? I'm guessing this won't sell well in Haiti.
$4000 for this Krell product is insane when you consider you can spend 1/10th of this on a Wadia Digital iTransport, which is the only real way to get a pure digital output out of an iPod. So far as I know, Wadia is the only company to get this license out of Apple.
who will buy this product? same audiophile who buys $200,000 worth of audio equipment. so we might as well shut up cause we are not the target market for this equipment.
If you want a reasonable alternative check out the Wadia dock. It reads the digital stream from a late model iPod and has a high quality DAC. Slap some lossless files on your iPod and you have a very good (dare I say it) audiophile class system (assuming you have amps and speakers to match).
Krell stuff is ALWAYS expensive. Don't get hung up on the price. Frankly, if you run in audiophile circles, you see enough $20K turntables and $50K monoblock power amps to make the Krell dock look like chump change.
While I wanted to jump on the easy-target bandwagon, people seem to have forgotten about Apple Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC) which gets you back to uncompressed CD quality.
But all of you complainers are DVD-Audio and Super Audio CD snobs, right?
I believe the 2nd generation that B&W is working on now in the UK (Zeppelin 2nd) will be improved enough to be considered decent high end sound and only cost about $600 compete !
FLAC files playback are very impressive on the Zeppelin unit out now.
While Krell may make some amazing home geer I rather have a Tube AR Mono Amp anyday over it !
I just wish any new high end dock with Speakers like the B&W also can play/accept a BluRay disc cause that is the best uncompressed quality going foward in the near future......
I once read the most comlicated Tech article that went for pages about DVD-Audio vs SACD and in the end the DVD Audio came out superior in terms of purity and a Natural signal !
All the extra detail in SACD was not all good detail, it seems.
The True HD BluRay Audio is even better then that (once it is mastered in the 192 range) but I do hope these higher end iPod docks incorperate it within them !
Krell Schmell! Maybe I'll feel better if I purchase my I-Pod from Hammacker Schlepper at list price and pay to download all of my tunes.
Actually its an inexpensive way to get audiophile quality sound digitally. Assume you already have the amp + speakers. Then an accpetable CD players costs over $4000. Or, get the Krell KID for $2000. You don't need the Papdock, because you already have an amp. Now you can rip your CDs to high quality format, load to your iPOD, plop it into the KID, and voila. The savings comes from the fact that there you don't have a CD transport .. which add to the costs to combat the noisiness spinning the disk, insuring the laser stay calibrated, etc.
You're leaving out some components in the Wadia configuration. Krell KID has a DAC built in. Wadia 170i does not, so you need a DAC. Wadia 521 DAC costs $6000 ! Also, if you already have an amp, you don't need the PapaDock.
RJT makes a good point.
The digital signal from the ipod is basically as good as as anything out there.
Its getting that signal out and into a good DAC that is the real issue.
The Wadia gets to the digital signal, bypassing the DAC on the ipod.
The Krell, I don't believe the Krell has a DAC. I think it uses the ipod DAC.
SO what to do.
Wait for the Bel Canto Ultra-Dock
See copy from Bel Canto site below:
Out of all the ways to connect an iPod to your stereo and television, the Bel Canto Ultra-Dock is the only one expensive enough, at $2,000, to warrant attention from notoriously spendy audiophiles.
According to the company, "other 'high-end' docks ignore the fundamental problem with using the iPod as a content source -- audio fidelity is degraded when music files are compressed." To sweeten the sound of compressed music, this docking station houses an Analog Devices AD21369 32-bibit floating-point digital signal processing core and 96kHz/24-bit converters for analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog, resulting in a 110dB dynamic range with distortion of under .004 percent.
The dock will also include DSP technologies for improving sound quality: Adaptive Dynamics (restores the sound quality of compressed audio), X-Matrix (virtual surround sound for two speakers or headphones), and Extrapolator, which turns the iPod's stereo signal to 5.1- or 7.1-channel sound. All of these signal processors have separate modes for compressed, lossless, and movie audio.
Audio inputs include S/PDIF and Toslink (from CD quality all the way up to 96 kHz/24-bit). The dock outputs video in the S-video, composite, and component formats. A single control knob handles all functions, while an LCD on the front of the unit displays song information and menu items. All of these components take up a fair amount of space; it's 8.5 inches wide, 1.5 inches high, and a foot deep.
The Bel Canto Ultra-Dock will be available at some point in 2008... probably towards the end, since the company only had a non-functional prototype on display.