Philips Fidelio DS8550 wireless iPad speaker

Reg Hardware pronounced Philips' Fidelio DS9000 to be pick of the current crop of premium iPod docks, beating even the much-loved and well-reviewed B&W Zeppelin. Clearly, Philips is onto something here, because its Fidelio DS8550 is pretty bloody good too. Now, I didn't review the DS9000 - m'colleague Alun Taylor had that …

[DaveyP]

Bluetooth

Not been mentioned as far as I've seen, but iOS4 works MUCH better with Bluetooth, and holds the connections. Under 3.x it dropped them a lot when idling - I upgraded on Tuesday and it hasn't dropped yet.

BTW, rather than upgrading and buying speakers, etc, you can just buy a BT adapter that will plug in the aux sockets on your existing stereo. Works a treat...

[David Gosnell]

Shame about the dock

Shame it has a physical dock really, but then you wouldn't be able to show off your iPad so prominently and conversation-startingly I guess. Hopefully one day wireless streaming on stereo equipment will be taken as read as much as having a CD player - which used to have big fancy arrows and things back in the 80s, in much the same attention-seeking manner.

[handle]

Does it make a difference?

"The secret, incidentally, is to treat the iDevice simply as a controller and music store. The Fidelio takes the digital data and runs it through its own digital-to-analogue converter (DAC) rather than rely on the one in the player. It does make a difference."

How do you know that? Does it have the ability to play analogue audio from the iPad?

[Tony Smith, Editor, Reg Hardware]

Re: Does it make a difference?

Yes: out of the iPad headphone socket and into the Fidelio aux port.