It’s hard to imagine any iPhone owner out there that doesn’t already have a docking solution to connect their iPhone or iPod to their home HiFi system. But that hasn’t stopped Pure from releasing the i-20 dock, which puts your iDevice up on a pedestal and allows you to share its content with your stereo using either digital or analogue connections.
The beauty of the i-20 comes in its digital connection capability, as well as its high-end audio internals. But thanks to its onboard DAC, even the analogue audio connections benefit. For the audiophiles out there:
For its analogue output, i-20 again extracts the digital signal and uses its Cirrus 4353 hi-fi quality DAC and high-precision low-jitter clock to deliver true hi-fi audio performance levels with a -105dB signal to noise ratio, better than -93dB THD+N and 2V RMS audio output from its 24-bit 192KHz digital audio processor.
The i-20 is a pricey dock though, weighing in at a hefty $149. Which means that it’s mostly going to appeal to the type of person who likes paying attention to the numbers in that blockquoted paragraph, although with the integrated video output and support for pretty much any analogue output, anybody could enjoy it.
[Pure]
Simon Reidy
Thursday, February 3, 2011 at 10:48 AMShame it doesn’t have HDMI. Given Apple limits video output to only 480p via analogue component, its still not a solution for watching HD content shot and stored on the device.
The digital audio out is appealing, but only for uncompressed or 320kbps tracks or you’re really not going to hear any difference.
For $100US you’re better off getting one of these – http://www.engadget.com/2011/01/03/mili-hd-iphone-ipad-charging-dock-boasts-internal-speaker-hdm/ as HDMI will output both digital audio and digital video negating the need for an expensive DAC.