Pioneering electronica artist Jean-Michel Jarre is on a mission to make us think about the "quality of reproduction" of our music, but perversely, he's doing it by launching an iPod speaker system.
The new AeroSystem is currently only available in France - it looks rather like three metal cutlery holders stacked in a glass tube - and costs €450.
This is all well and good, but MusicRadar is a little confused about Jarre's rationale for launching the product.
While we agree that there's a quality gap between "high-quality hi-fi systems" and using "laptops to listen to music as MP3s", the fact is that most iPods contain compressed music that will never be up to audiophile standards.
This being the case, you could argue that launching a speaker system that's specifically designed to be used with Apple's player will perpetuate rather than buck the trend that Jarre is concerned about.
When he says that "sound quality is often overlooked in favour of its ease of use and storage", one can only assume that he's challenging the iPod's dominance, so why release a product that's specifically designed to support it?
Maybe something's got lost in translation - the press release was originally written in French - but like we said, we're confused.
(Via Engadget)
