HiFi Blog: digital audio goodness

Good news, and if I may, about time: a working group has been announced by the Consumer Electronics Association to “create an industry standard docking connector specification that could be adopted by any host or portable device manufacturer regardless of the format or protocol that it supports.” If you use an iPod (and have pledged to never buy a Jobs-endorsed product product again) you probably won’t care (because this isn’t about iPods), but if you like to keep your options open and/or own another portable audio device, this interests you a lot.

In short this means, that your portable audio devices will have the same dock connector. You’ll need one cable to connect either to your car, one dock to do the charging or to handle the music transfers from your computers, one set of dock-using accessories (FM transmitters, recorders, whatever—think the range of iPod accessories that use the dock) that you can use on either one of your devices. Hopefully by now, you can see why this is good news. Now let’s wait how soon it’ll take for the CES working group to actually deliver.