Daily Desired: High-Fidelity Sound Product You’ll Actually Use

One reason even sound nerds are abandoning high-fidelity audio gear is that it’s ugly. The appearance of these products doesn’t always sing. This USB interface will improve the sound of your digital music, and it’s handsome enough that you’ll care.

The Duet2 is a digital to analogue converter for Mac — it plugs into your USB port, sucks the raw digital files off your hard drive and processes the data super accurately. If you’ve got uncompressed music files, the Duet2 will spit perfection out of its headphone jack.

The Duet2 is also as pretty as an Apple product. It actually sort of looks like an iPhone and provokes in me the same longing. That’s important because audio quality can be elusive. if I’m going to buy an auxiliary sound product to put next to my computer, my eyes better be just as convinced as my ears that it’s worth $US600. My MacBook wasn’t cheap, and there’s no law that says accessories have to be. The Duet2 doesn’t just play the part — it looks the part, too. [Apogee Electronics]

Daily Desired is our look at a product we’re drooling over.