Tivoli Audio iSongBook review

The iSongBook isn't Tivoli Audio's first foray into combining iPod functionality with its renowned AM/FM radios, but it's the first to wholeheartedly embrace the little white music player.

Tivoli, like Apple, is known for the high-quality, high-price and beautiful design of its products, most notably the gorgeous Pal radio. As such Tivoli and the iPod seem like a marriage made in aural heaven. So we had high expectations of the iSongBook.

While not as immediately striking as the Pal, the iSongBook is easily the most stylish iPod speaker system we've seen. It ships in three parts. The main body of the unit houses the AM/FM tuner, a single speaker, a flip-down iPod dock, and controls for volume, input selection and radio station presets. You connect a second speaker by means of a 3.5mm minijack, the captive cable for which is 2m long and cleverly hidden on a spool inside the speaker's case. Should you prefer to have the second speaker connected to the main body, rather than at the other side of a shelf, there are four pins that slot neatly into rubber-cased holes on the side of the iSongBook to hold it in place. The final part is a credit-card-sized remote control, which can be used to control the main functions of the radio and a docked iPod.

The iSongBook ticks most of the boxes for features. It has an LCD backlit clock with alarm and sleep timer, five presets for the radio and the option of taking input from any line-in audio source instead of an iPod. The iPod charges when docked, and the dock folds neatly into the unit when not in use.

The device ships with a 12V power adaptor, but can also run from six AA batteries. Further, if you use NiMH or NiCad rechargeable batteries, they'll be charged inside the unit when the power adaptor is in use. This makes the iSongBook a good option for taking on a picnic or listening to your iPod through speakers in the garden.

There's a lot to like about the iSongBook. It looks good, is solidly built and has some nice touches - such as the selector switch that clicks satisfyingly into place and the captive screw on the battery compartment that will never be lost. However, all that is undermined by distinctly underwhelming audio performance. Perhaps it's too much to expect satisfying performance from speakers that are only 6cm in diameter, but the iSongBook delivers a severe lack of oomph. What's more, there was a muddiness to the sound on many of the tracks we tested and a noticeable lack of detail in others. Quality was good for acoustic tracks and more mellow, downbeat songs. If you spend your days listening to James Blunt or Katie Melua, you may not notice. But try to pump some Hard-Fi or Kaiser Chiefs through the system and the speakers' inadequacy becomes apparent.

We also found the remote to be fiddly and it didn't always do what we expected or what was labelled on the buttons.

We could overlook the audio quality if the iSongBook was cheap, but it's not. Tivoli is asking you to spend £300, and we're afraid it's just not worth it. At that price, we would expect it to have a DAB tuner as well. Stylish, yes. Functional, certainly. But, ultimately, the iSongBook just isn't worth the money.