andylockran’s blog

I have a Bose SoundDock. My Dad bought it me as my 20th Birthday Present. Compared to any other speakers I have it’s completely unrivalled. The sound quality is amazing - and I especially liked it when I used RockBox on my iPod and could listen to uncompressed Music on it. The quality was superb.

However, as previously mentioned I had to switch back to the apple software to make the iPod interface with my “iPod capable” car stereo - and to get the remote working on the SoundDock. It’s a shame, but a necessary one in my eyes.

Now, the only comment I have about the Bose SoundDock is the fact that it doesn’t have an aux-input, and in true FLOSSgeek style, it annoys me that such a brilliant product is inherently tied to a single-vendor’s product; namely, the iPod. The other thing that annoys me is that I am therefore unable to hook it up to my computer. Surely a female to 1.2mm jack isn’t that difficult to manufacture - but nobody appears to make them (at a decent price). There are a number of howtos on the internet for adding the aux input to your SoundDock by taking it apart and doing some soldering - but that doesn’t appeal to me. Were I to make a mistake that’s a £250 loss - not something I want to comprehend.

So, I looked into other ways of doing it - and as with most things progression means vulnerability. Apple have supplied me with the ammunition themselves.

I recently popped into the apple store to see if there were any female iPod connectors that I could disassemble (I don’t mind breaking something at that value - and it would mean the warranty on the SoundDock would stay valid.) They had the “Griffin 2nd Generation Shuffle Dock Adapter,” - cool. I bought one. It has a 1.2 mm jack sticking up out of the top of it. All I need now is a female-to-male 1.2mm extension cable and I have the appliance.

However, the apple/griffin people are clever - and have added a plastic surround to the adapter which means that any 1.2mm female adapters would be held ~1mm off being able to connect properly… or so they thought.I then popped to MicroDirect, based in Manchester (also online at www.microdirect.co.uk) and purchased a 1.2mm extension cable, expecting to have to file down at the griffin adapter so that it would rest flush with the cable… I was mightily surprised.

I don’t know if the microdirect supplier is anti-apple (but it would appear they are, via proxy (me)), but their extension cable has a ~1mm gap between the end of the jack and the plastic surround. This means that it fits _without_ any modification to either part - and allows me to connect my Computer, and any portable audio (or immovable audio for the pedants out there) to my SoundDock.

Mission Accomplished.