Depending on your viewpoint, the £3,740 ElectroKID system is either a serious and successful attempt at wringing the best possible sound out of an Apple iPod, or a rich audiophile's folly.

Actually, it's both, and we should love it for being both.

The ElectroKID is formed of two products from two different American high-end manufacturers - Krell and MartinLogan.

Bringing out the best in the iPod

The connection is Absolute Sounds, the UK distributor for both products. Ricardo Franissovici, Grande Fromage of Absolute Sounds, realised that the combination of iPod 'interface' and active loudspeakers could deliver the sort of sound quality that even Apple might not have expected from the ubiquitous iPod. And so, the ElectroKID was born.

The name itself is a portmanteau of 'electrostatic loudspeaker' (the MartinLogan Purity) and 'KID', which is itself an acronym for 'Krell Interface Dock'. Technically, it should be 'KIDelectro', but that sounds way too 1980's!

Incidentally, if you type 'electrokid' into Google on the interweb, you get a lot of DJs before you get to this system.

The Krell Interface Dock was the big audiophile controversy of 2007, because it was the first iPod-related product from a big name high-end brand. And, like all controversy, it has set the trend; at the CES 2008 we saw products like the Wadia 170 iPod transport follow in the footsteps of the KID.

A dock for all iPods

The £1,350 Krell Interface Dock is essentially an iPod dock combined with line preamplifier. It has both balanced and single-ended inputs, a composite and S-Video connection for video, and an RS232 port for those using high-end Crestron/AMX-style remote control systems.

It also has an auxiliary line-level input mini-jack on the front panel, for those wanting to use a digital audio player that is not of the iPod family.

Krell has been canny with the universal docking connector. Inset into a silo on the top of the KID, this has four little clear Perspex rods that wheel back and forth to make a snug fit for the iPod. So, you can guarantee an iPod Nano will sit just as robustly as an iPod Classic.

The KID does not crack the digital code within the iPod, but instead has mild filtering in post processing to help give the signal the best possible start in life (there's also subtle treble and bass tone controls, which are useful when trying to improve a lot of compressed audio sources).

Missed a trick

Strangely, given the fact that every single company in the audio industry has latched onto the iPod as potential saviour of their business, precious few exploited the fact that the iPod actually delivers a differential output. This means it's a doddle to run balanced outputs from the Apple player, but the KID is the first product to take advantage of this.

Applause for Krell and dumb points all round to everyone else for missing an obvious trick. Krell runs its differential amplifier circuitry in Class A, so the KID runs warm - not hot enough to reach for the Calpol, though.

Incidentally, Krell is considering a second iPod product - a full preamp with docking capability, called Papa Doc, although presumably not named after the possibly insane mid-20th Century Haitian dictator, Francois 'Papa Doc' Duvalier.

Powerful bass

The KID is joined by the MartinLogan Purity loudspeaker, to form the ElectroKID system. Last year, MartinLogan launched two entry-level speakers - the passive Source and active Purity. You could be forgiven for expecting the only difference between the two speakers to be the amplifiers, given that they were launched so close to one another.