  You know the line. Soon coming to a theatre near you. B+W's
new $599 Zeppelin Air is due at dealerships next month. It's as
good an opportunity as any to talk about technological IQ. As a
breed, high-enders overlook this product category altogether. In
this instance it would overlook an object lesson in clever
engineering that ought to be applied to 'our' type product.  For
starters this iDock machine's five drivers are actively
amplified. This means discrete amps for each transducer—4 x 25
watts for the tweeters and mids, 1 x 50 watts for the woofer—and
electronic crossovers. During a CES 2011 interview, B+W's
engineers talked of having rewritten DSP code to adapt this new
scheme over the Zeppelin's precursor model. This suggests that
the Zeppelin Air applies intelligent equalization in the digital
domain for both natural bass boost and overall response
linearization.  The reason the Zeppelin Air can do that is its
digital-direct iPod dock (the original Zeppelin's wasn't). By
starting with digital files ra