Systems for streaming your music throughout your home wirelessly (think of the Sonos-network or Bluetooth-speakers) have been around for some time, but since Apple made its AirPlay-technology available for iOS-devices at the end of 2010, the iPod speakers with AirPlay-support shoot up like mushrooms. The Berlin audio brand Teufel takes a leap into the deep with the iTeufel Air and claims to deliver 100 Watt of Wi-Fi -quality. If this is true we are now going to investigate thoroughly.
Teufel
The company Teufel is just as many other audio brands founded by a music lover with entrepreneurial talent. In 1979 Peter Tschimmel opened the first store in Berlin with an assortment ‘do-it-yourself’ stereo speaker components. Nowadays Teufel is the leader in online speaker sales in Europe and the largest company of THX speakers in the world. With their Home Cinema-sets they often win awards and with their iTeufel Air they hope to also have one of the better AirPlay-speakers in the market.
German thoroughness
The iTeufel Air is with its size of 17.5 x 43.5 x 27 centimetres a pretty robust device. It is smaller than pictures make you believe. Also the weight of 5.7 kg is not too bad. The housing consists of sturdy white plastic and the speaker grill is both at the front and the side covered with black fabric with the Teufel-logo at the bottom. The whole feels very robust and also the plastic base, which has an aluminium look, seems to be sturdy. On top of the device you can find the power button and two volume buttons. At the back you will find the Setup-key, a line in (or 3.5mm connector) and the AC input. A simple but clean design which can stand rough handling with a 12 year guarantee on its housing: German thoroughness.
What exactly is AirPlay?
AirPlay is, as mentioned before, an Apple technology for wirelessly streaming music or other media files to different devices through a Wi-Fi-network. The advantages are that it is possible to play lossless audio (without loss of quality/compression) and the large range. Disadvantages are that a you need a WiFi-network (unless you don’t need an internet connection while playing your music, but this is time-consuming) and there is a delay of a few seconds in the sound. The latter makes that watching a movie or playing a game is intricate and that rewinding or fast-forwarding of music is inaccurate.
Installing such an AirPlay-device is relatively simple. The iTeufel Air supports WPS and if your router has a WPS button, you can connect with just one push of the button. If not, you’ll enter your Wi-Fi-network with accompanying password settings in five simple steps and a few seconds later you are ready for streaming music. iDevices can stream all audio through AirPlay, but also your Mac or PC can do more than just stream media via iTunes (provided that you have a program such as Airfoil).
