Design
Plenty of iPod/iPhone speaker docks complicate matters with billions of buttons. Ravon's Fidelio Mini Hi-Fi keeps things simple with a central docking unit that comprises a volume wheel, mute button and controls for switching between iPod and auxiliary input. The rear of the dock offers up audio output via standard speaker wire, S-Video, 3.5mm audio-in and a power switch. It's a clean, simple design that works quite well. Our review sample was in piano-black plastic, so naturally five minutes after installation it resembled a crime scene after the fingerprint dusting crew had been in.
There must be a rule in the designer's handbook that says that iPod speaker systems under a certain price point must have tiny remote controls, because the Fidelio certainly doesn't go against that particular flow. Again, though, the accent on simple is maintained with easily understood play, pause, skip, mute and menu controls on offer.
Features
From a speaker perspective, the Fidelio offers up a pair of 15W RMS speakers with 3.5-inch drivers and 1-inch tweeters. That's not the highest-end speaker set-up we've ever seen with an iPod connector on the other end, but at this kind of price point it's perfectly acceptable.
Performance
The benefit of a micro iPod docking system over an integrated one is that you can genuinely separate out the speakers for multi-channel audio. Smaller docks often suffer from presenting audio that's not much better than it might have been in mono, but the stereo effect only really works if the speakers provided are any good. The Fidelio's speakers impressed us with crisp and deep audio across a variety of genres. They're perhaps a touch bass-heavy for some music types, and that's something that's worth keeping in mind as there's no facility for any kind of audio adjustment on-board.
The other factor that plays against the Fidelio is that it's not shielded for iPhone use. That's not always a problem with every dock, but during our testing the Fidelio's speakers showed themselves to be particularly prone to interference, buzzing away merrily every time we got a phone call or SMS message.
We tested the Fidelio's video output chops with the iTunes SD store version of The Dark Knight. Video quality wasn't spectacular, but putting the perspective in that it's a low quality copy being transmitted across an inferior AV output mechanism, we would have been surprised if it was. We'd happily call it passable for casual viewing, and the quality of the speakers made the film more enjoyable than straight headphone viewing would have.
Conclusion
Co-opting the name of a work of great composer (Fidelio was the name of Beethoven's only opera) for your iPod micro system can go either way. If the product is a masterpiece, you've chosen well. If it's a disaster, you were clearly over-reaching. Ravon's dock isn't perfect, but it's simple to operate and works well, and that's good enough for us.
