Radiopaq Sound Jacket: nano technology to pimp your 'Pod

By Rich Trenholm on 20 April 2009, 2:27pm

What's your favourite kind of jacket? Bolero, donkey, Nehru or smoking? Crave favours the classic mod-style Harrington, but has now been introduced to the Radiopaq Sound Jacket, which has the added effect of making music sound better.

Bear with us on this one. The Sound Jacket is a metal sleeve that you slot your fourth-gen iPod nano into. The Jacket will then beef up the sound, improving the performance through your headphones or speakers. The Jacket boasts a dock connector in the bottom for hooking the whole shebang up to your speakers -- as long as your dock is the right shape -- or mains operation. With no power supply of its own, the Jacket will draw roughly half of your nano's juice.

Radiopaq is an Internet radio portal we first stumbled across a year ago, with designs on getting into hardware. The Sound Jacket is a nano-specific version of the Sound Mix, an in-line headphone adaptor that boosts the sound of any MP3 player.

We were the first to get pictures of the Sound Jacket when Radiopaq dropped into CNET Towers last week for an exclusive hands-on. The final production version will probably be a slightly different colour, but probably won't have a Baracuta G9-style tartan interior. Which is a shame.

We had a listen, and there's no doubt the Mix and Jacket beef up weedy MP3s. Bass is fuller and the high end clearer. Our resident aural expert, Nate 'GoldenEars' Lanxon, will no doubt have something to say on the subject when he listens the heck out of the Radiopaq Custom Tuned Earphones, also pressed into our clammy hands, each of which is optimised for a specific genre. The Sound Mix and Sound Jacket will be available soon, for £80.