When Apple introduced the Hi-Fi earlier this year, I thought it was cool, but there were two things that bothered me about it… The price, and the lack of integrated Wi-Fi.
J&R music is helping out a little on the first item. They’ve dropped the price form $349 to $299.99. I’m not sure if the price drop is permanent, or only for a limited time.
If you’ve been eying the Hi-Fi, but thought it was a bit pricey, here’s your chance to save about $50. J&R sells through their own site, and through Amazon, so you can take advantage of the price break from either site. Oh, and buying through my links below helps to support this site. :)
I have really begun to appreciate the magic and convenience of the iPod and mp3 music, but i cannot stand to listen to it on a good stereo. The compression artifacts and general muddiness of the music are just too distracting. I’ve found that CDs burned from playlists are especially bad – I don’t know if that is due to the conversion of mp3 BACK to ‘uncompressed’ – but they are hard to listen to. I don’t consider myself an audiophile snob; I enjoy music of all sorts and on all kinds of playback gear – the headphones that came with my iPod sound VERY good. But if I try to crank up a CD burned from iTMS-purchased music in my car, it just hurts. The point is – I wouldn’t spend $350, or $299, or more than $100 to hear my iPod music loud and clear. A $6 patch-cord to hook it up to my modest home theatre system can do it all the justice it deserves! (or maybe the $100 iHome Deluxe, with video playback and on-screen menus?)
I 2 wish that the Hi-Fi had Wi-Fi. Heck, even the name seems to hint at it, don’t you think? Anyway, the other thing I thought the Hi-Fi should have was RADIO. I mean, they have that slick, and overpriced at $50, radio remote for the iPod, why couldn’t they have that little thing built into that box. If the software is already on the iPod it would just pop up as another item to choose from. That would have made it more like a fully functional stereo. Maybe in the next version they will take care of us both. Then I might actually consider buying it. From the time it was announced it just didn’t do it for me.