Some Tips For Purchasing iPod Speaker Docks

Purchasing a speaker dock for your iPod has become more of a challenge lately since Apple has changed its dock connector. The new iPhone 5 which was launched this October along with the latest generation of iPod devices all have a new lightning connector which replaces the traditional 30-pin docking connector that we are all so familiar with.

This break in standard is going to cause quite some problems for some dock manufacturers since all of a sudden their speaker docks will no longer work with new Apple portable devices. Unfortunately, Apple has made the pinout of the docking connector quite a bit more complicated. While in the previous connector would have pins allocated for specific functions, the new docking connector dynamically assigns pins for functions that are needed by a particular dock.

A simple charging dock for example is only going to require some power pins while a typical Amphony ipod speaker dock will in addition require the audio line-level signals in order to play music. In addition, Apple has integrated an authentication chip which is required for the new Apple devices to recognize the dock. This chip is fairly expensive and will probably raise the cost of speaker docks which is yet another challenge for dock manufacturers.

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