iLuv 9200 iPod-friendly four-disc CD player

A less irritated aspect of the control system is the iPod interface/ While you can play/pause your iPod, skip tracks on the currently selected playlist, and even engage the player's shuffle mode by hitting the remote's Random button, you can't choose music using the 9200.

Now, I'll admit my Nano's screen is too small to be read at a distance, but the 9200 has a big enough display to handle basic song navigation. If other iPod dock accessories can let you see what's loaded on the player, so should the 9200. If you can listen to four CDs before you need to get up and change them, why not let rump rest on sofa for a little bit longer while you pick some songs on a connected iPod?

iLuv 9200: whiter shade of pale

The iPod dock sits below a spring-loaded flap, and iLuv bundles half a dozen dock adaptors, each with a back against which the player rests while you select tracks. The downside: with the adaptor in place, the lid doesn't close when you take out the iPod, losing the benefit of having a flap in the first place.

The face of the 9200 is home to the power button, a circular backlit monochrome LCD and, tucked away at the bottom, enough buttons to make the machine look busy without overdoing it as so many music centres do. Among the controls are a pair of buttons to slide away the left and right CD covers - only one at a time, though. The covers open too slowly and on the review sample were liable to stick. The 9200 may look like a Bang & Olufsen unit - particularly the black model - but it's not engineered anywhere near as well.

Practical or posey? Only you can say whether the four-drive CD set-up is more B&O or B&Q, but as someone whose CDs are sitting in a box in the attic, I can't wait for the version of the 9200 without the disc drives and the space they take up. But whether you've yet to make the move to computer-stored music, or you're using both digital and physical formats, the 9200's exciting sound quality makes it very worthy of consideration. Particularly when it only costs 150 quid.

Verdict

Stylish looks and a vibrant, immediate sound quality with both CD and compressed formats allow the iLuv 9200 to get the best out of your digital music library and your physical disc collection, bringing them to life without any of the flatness that hinders most iPod amplifier and speaker sets. That more than compenstates for the poor remote, the unit's engineering quirks and the lack of an auxilliary input.