Sound quality
Were those one hundred watts any good? Some indication of sound quality (and not in the BS terms increasingly pervading audio reviews on here) could be useful for the wonga involved?
As AirPlay speakers go, the iTeufel Air is big. Placed next to, say Audyssey’s Audio Dock Air, it dwarfs its rival — though it’s marginally less wide than B&W’s Zeppelin Air. The glossy white wedge houses two 80mm mid-range drivers, a 25mm tweeter, and a 130mm woofer, and pumps out a total of 100W. Teufel Audio iTeufel Air …
A good point well made, but as another commenter suggested, it does beg the question of whether this was anything more than a rehashed press release and spec sheet. I'd be happy with a "sounds great" / "sounds a piece of crap" for the asking price, as an obviously subjective but vaguely useful metric without getting into nonsense terms like "openness", "evidence of gold plated OFC cabling" etc.
I re-read the article, assuming I'd missed the point of it, but no, it seems there is no effort to make any comment on sound quality at all! Actually, having re-read it, I don't think Mr Hemphill was ever in possetion of the item in question - everything in the article could be quite easily deduced from reading the blurb on the companies website - dimensions, price, promo pictures would all be there.. Surely the 'Hard Facts' include the sound quality?!
So, El Reg, what's the point? And how on earth do you get to 85% without even judging the sound quality?!
OBJECTIVE OBSERVATION ALERT.
It seems to me that RegHW gets slammed every time they provide a review of an audio product with commentary on sound quality and now they're getting slammed for not providing commentary :)
Aside from that I could do with another AirPlay round-up as I'm actually in the market for an AirPlay Speaker (s) / HiFi at the moment (completely undecided on brands, sizes, form factors, other features as yet).
Though given that once your friends get bored with you showing off the svelte lines etc, the bottom line is does it sound any good. Without that judgement, howsoever expressed, it makes having reviews of audio equipment pointless, and we may as well all pack up and go home - or spend all our living hours in shops, in respect of which reviews are supposed to save us the effort.
But i'd rather buy an airport express, and a powered monitor combo - Sure it's not compact, but I'm certain the sound would be better, and at less cost. Also if the airport bit fries or the dock goes out of fashion in 5 years it's still actually usable instead of being an expensive paperweight.
Plus the airport express is one of the best bits of networking kit for flexibility I've ever owned. In 3 properties now it has performed really well as a wireless to ethernet bridge for non-wireless kit, whilst also always providing audio streaming to my stereo.
>But i'd rather buy an airport express, and a powered monitor combo
I did exactly this to set up a whole house audio system. In-ceiling speakers, auto-sensing amps in the basement, a rack of Expresses[1], and the wife's iMac as a media server. I wasn't really expecting too much when I first started setting up, mostly convenience and the wife approval factor of no visible wiring, but it sounds great, and ended up costing far less than competitive approaches.
[1] that do occasionally get borrowed when I need decent swiss army knife for networking issues.