Altec Lansing inMotion Max iPhone speaker

The world is not exactly short of portable iPod speaker systems, ranging from the merely adequate - such as Logitech's Pure-Fi Anywhere - to the rather good - such as Intempo's InSession. Generally, they sell for about £100, are about the size of a large house brick and produce a sound that while fine for the odd hour or two in …

[Andy B]

Active speakers?

"Though the inMotion has four 2in speakers only two of them are active..."

Pardon my ignorance but what does this mean? Are the other two only for show?

Paris for no particular reason

[Al Taylor]

@ Andy B

Andy, two of the speakers are active and two are passive rather than all four being powered. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_speaker.

[Sam York]

My post making the same point doesn't appear to have passed moderation due to high levels of sarcasm

Active/passive speakers is a slightly nebulous distinction. The speaker drivers are always passive, the term active simply refers to the amplification being built into the same box. Therefore, in this case, the whole unit can be considered active, although the active/passive designation would more usually apply to standalone speakers/speakers with amps in and doesn't usually apply to 'all-in-ones' such as this, that have a tuner, iPod dock, CD player or whatever built in. They're just 'an iPod dock' or 'a ghetto blaster', the fact they're active is taken as a given since nobody has built anything which includes a source signal and some speakers, but not the amps for the speakers, cos that'd be silly.

If it had two passive speakers and two active speakers, that would mean that only half the speakers worked until you hooked up an external amp to the input on the back for the other two. Which I would bet my bottom dollar is not the case with this product!

@ Al Taylor, I can assure you that all four will be powered - what would be the point of only powering half of them?

[Craig]

Strange bit of maths..

"ranging from the merely adequate - such as Logitech's Pure-Fi Anywhere - to the rather good - such as Intempo's InSession."

You say this...even though the former was rated 5% higher than the latter in your testing?

80% > 75% ?

[Al Taylor]

@ Sam York

This is - verbatim - how the manufacturer describes the speaker units -

"Two 2” (50 mm) full-range drivers + two 2” (50 mm) passive radiators."

[Sam York]

@ Al

Aaaaah. Makes sense now!

Passive radiators =/= passive speakers. A passive radiator is a driver assembly with no voice coil or magnet (so basically just a cone of paper) that will vibrate in sympathy with the other one due to air pressure fluctuations inside the speaker cabinet. It's not doing a great deal towards the sound (the cynical part of my brain suggests it's a cheap way of improving the looks/desirability of the product without forking out for another pair of drivers or the uprated amps to power them), I thought this sort of thing had fallen out of favour a long time ago so it didn't enter my head at all!

[Al Taylor]

@ Craig,

Craig, we rated the Logitech PureFi Anyware dock at 65% not 80%.

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/07/03/review_logitech_pure_fi_anywhere_ipod_speakers/

Ratings also reflect the cost of the device.