Gear4 Duo iPod and iPhone Speaker System
Gear4’s Duo speaker was nominated in the Best iPod Accessory category at this year’s Macworld awards, was listed by in their Buyers Guide 2009 as a ‘Gift to Hunt For’ and is one of the best selling iPod speaker docks on the market.
It’s essentially a Home Speaker with a secret. The secret is that in its ‘main’ configuration, as you can see in the image, the Duo is essentially a sub-woofer speaker system, but the face plate that houses the drivers and tweeters, is removable.
Price £89.95 £63.00 at John Lewis
Gear4 call this face plate the Satellite Speaker and this can be powered by a built-in Lithium-ion battery which should give up to 5 hours of play, when separated from the sub-woofer base unit.
The idea of the Satellite speaker is that if you’re listening to your favourite podcast and don’t want to have to stop listening just because you need to go the kitchen to make dinner, you don’t have. You just need to take the Duo’s Satellite Speaker with you. In the same way, if you were going away for the night and still wanted to enjoy your favourite tunes you could take the Satellite with you.
Gear4 do sell a ‘Duo Travel Pack’ which is sold separately and includes a lightweight travel case and spare battery for the speaker that makes it a viable travel speaker as well as being a genuine home speaker system.
The Duo offers a total 38 watt ouput (18W satellite speaker output) and the makers describe the sound quality as “crystal clear..(with).. bass-rich audio”. They’re not too far off the mark, the sound quality for a unit of this size is not bad at all, although if you really start to crank the Duo up you may find that the sound becomes a but ‘thin’ around the upper echelons of its volume limits.
The styling is simple and inoffensive. It doesn’t have the smart piano black finish of some speakers or the radical curves of others, but the dock will not embarrass you in good company as it looks perfectly respectable and would like nice in many a home.
So far, so good. For a reasonable price the Gear4 Duo gives us 2 iPod speakers for the price of one with its clever Satellite speaker design, a reasonable sound quality and its ‘not unpretty’ looks.
The problem that some people may have is that there’s not much more to tell you really. There aren’t any more clever features to tell you about.
The Duo doesn’t have USB connectivity or allow you to synch your iPod while it’s in the dock, it doesn’t have a nice LCD screen to show your photos on or a really special user interface. The Duo stands there with its clever ‘I can be two speakers’ set up and says to you ‘this should be enough’.
Price £89.95 £63.00 at John Lewis
At this price you’ve got to be honest, its clever functionality does set it apart from many other speakers but Gear 4 might want to contemplate adding a couple of extra goodies soon to keep the popularity of the Duo going.
Best iPod speaker of the year? Probably not. I think I’d much prefer to have the sexy B&W Mini Zeppelin anytime! But the Duo, in its class is not a bad bet at all.
We’d love to know what your favourite iPod speaker is. Please do leave me a comment and let me know your thoughts.
Always happy to give credit where credit’s due, those clever chaps at Stuff.tv have got a great video of the Duo where you can see and hear this clever gizmo for yourself. Just click here to take a look.
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