Altec Lansing have broken from the tradition of earlier IM series devices and made the IM7 a tubular design made of the same metal mesh but with a good dose of iPod white plastic and even a splash of grey rubber. The design is reminiscent of the 80's boom box with a unique cassette like loading system for your iPod. The inMotion IM& will take any size iPod from the smallest mini (4gb) to the full size fatty the iPod photo (60gb), adjusting the holder is achieved by a wheel on the back of the unit which twists until your iPod is held firmly.

The IM7 leaves the front of your Ipod open so that all the controls are still accessible, these are needed as the only controls on the IM7 itself are for volume and power. The rear of the unit under the carry handle contains the connectors, there are the expected power, headphones and auxiliary input but also S Video and composite video output allowing the iPod photo to be hooked up to a TV or AV devices.

Power is provided by either a small army of (8) D Cell batteries or by an AC power cord which for some reason is amazingly short, so much so that we'd have trouble having the IM7 on our desk and reaching the socket in the skirting board, good job we had a power block to hand then! Altec have also packaged the unit with 4 interchangeable power adaptors allowing you to carry the IM7 around the world on your travel's and we are sure you'll get a few excess baggage changes too!

So the question you really want answered, how does it sound? Well pervious inMotion units have managed to do a good job but somehow lacked the clarity of the Bose Sound dock or iBoom but this IM7 is a different kettle of fish altogether. The pairs of 1 inch tweeters and 3 inch midrange drivers provide a well balanced sound but the real star of the show is the 4 inch side mounted subwoofer which adds real weight to the overall sound.

We half expected a muddled sound dominated by the bass from the subwoofer, but a pleasant surprise was the overall makeup of the IM7's performance, its not the most accomplished unit perhaps more suited to a party than listening to classical music but for mainstream music from an iPod the inMotion is more than acceptable. The subwoofer did have one downside which was causing the table it sat on to vibrate and rattle, it took us a few tries to get it sitting properly to eliminate the annoying noise.

The remote control is required if you want to try and adjust the tonal balance but this is possibly one of the worst remotes we've seen in a long while, in fact remote is almost the wrong name as you have to be so close its hardly remote at all. It's possible to adjust volume and bass / treble from the remote but the unit does not reset these when you re power or eject your iPod making the remote a necessity.

We also found it annoying that you cannot connect your iPod to a PC or Mac while in the unit as there is no female connector on the rear of the unit for this purpose, so don't get any ideas of synchronising your MP3 collection while its sitting in the IM7.

You may think that all of these small annoyances make the Altec inMotion IM7 a bad device, but its overall styling and rich room filling sound still won us over, it's easily able to compete with the Bose Sound dock and seems to have less distortion that its supposedly more credible rival. Due in the UK soon its likely to under cut the £250 Bose system and cost about as much as your 20gb iPod!

Published - 26/06/2005

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