THE POD COMPLEX
Apr 1, 2007 12:00 PM, Markkus Rovito
Eventually we may have to admit that the iPod's almost godlike domination over the world is a little creepy. With all the white headphone wires dangling in every corner of their periphery, muggers don't even know whom to jack anymore. It's upsetting the natural order. But for now, with all the companies getting creative with luxurious accessories, the iPod is still too cool to sweat. People have been getting plenty funky with the iPod video playback, as witnessed by the Sonic Impact Video-55 ($199.95; www.si5.com), a portable, fold-out iPod dock with a 7-inch widescreen LCD for watching videos. And for a different concept in portable theater, there's the ViewSonic View Dock PJ258D Video iPod Projector ($1,399; www.viewsonic.com). This DLP projector shoots out images from a docked video iPod or nearly any connected computer, DVD player, game console, pay TV box, etc.
It's all love for video, but what really gets a musician's knickers in a twist is the new Belkin TuneStudio ($249.99; www.belkin.com) 4-channel audio mixer with a dock for recording straight into fifth-generation (video) iPods. This is the first device of its kind, and the first audio-production product from Belkin, so there will be a big sound-quality question to be answered when it drops this summer. For now, you can't deny that if you like your mixers cute, this is a good one. But aside from attention to looks, the TuneStudio seems well conceived. The four channels include 3-band EQ, pan and level controls, and two of them have XLR inputs with phantom-power and input-gain knobs. Despite the four channels, the device does not bypass the iPod's limit of recording only one stereo track. So the TuneStudio sends a master output to the iPod with independent compression control and makeup gain optimized for the iPod's level threshold. The final treat is that the TuneStudio is also a two-way USB audio interface for Mac or PC; it can input the computer's audio, as well as send audio from any of its connectors to a computer.
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