Krell intros the KID -- another expensive iPod dock you'll never buy
By Joshua Topolsky 
posted July 7th 2008 5:10PM
posted July 7th 2008 5:10PM
[Via Crave; Image courtesy Audio Junkies]
posted July 7th 2008 5:10PM
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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...