Griffin Evolve review

Griffin Evolve Review

Reviewed by: Nate Lanxon

Reviewed on: 14 February 2008

Performance
Forget about whether you like the design or not -- the Evolve's amazing convenience and ease-of-use is special. You can have a wireless music system set up in less than 30 seconds: dock your iPod, stick the speakers anywhere in your house and hit play on the remote. That's it.

The speakers use RF signals with a limited bandwidth, and the speakers themselves are only very average. Together this means sound quality's not amazing -- bass is a little weak and bright highs are nowhere to be seen -- it's vastly just mids. But they're reasonably loud and absolutely perfect for anyone who just wants music wherever they are in the house or office, without wanting to set up wireless music servers.

We had the Evolve's speakers pick up music from the base station located at the other side of our office -- a distance of about two house widths, separated by two walls. The remote control works on a slightly lower RF frequency and worked as far away from the base unit as the speakers were -- in either direction.

You can output video from the iPod via the composite cable socket on the base station. Well, you can when it's available in March -- the new iPod models didn't work with the video output feature, as we had a very early sample. We're told an update has been made for the time of launch, so new models will work. We'll post a confirmation in the next week or so to confirm this.

Conclusion
The Evolve may well be a very appealing product for a lot of people, despite its hefty £249 retail price. It's painfully simple to use, decent enough to look at and full of potential for parties.

If you're looking for the pinnacle in wireless audio streaming, don't miss the legendary offering from Sonos.

Edited by Jason Jenkins
Additional editing by Shannon Doubleday