Will this latest Apple add-on take the company one step closer to hi-fi domination?

For a company thought by many to have single-handedly revolutionised the music industry, from the computers on which music is recorded to little pocket devices on which to store favourite works – and even the means to buy them – Apple, to date, hasn’t been too successful when it comes to translating its success into the hi-fi arena.

Its Apple Hi-Fi unit – an ugly, plasticky stab at an iPod dock speaker system, launched back in 2005 – was widely regarded as pretty woeful, being bettered by a whole range of products from third-party companies. And while I note with some amusement that at the time of writing one optimistic company is hopeful that some unfortunate will stump up $800 – or well over £500 – for one of these units, the Apple Hi-Fi never caught on, not least because it really wasn’t. Hi-fi, that is.

In the intervening years, Apple seems to have contented itself with racking up monumental sales of iPods, iPhones and, most recently, iPads, not to mention flogging millions of “songs” – yes, even individual tracks of a complete classical work are “songs” – via its iTunes stores worldwide.

Rumours continue of ways in which it might be planning further to tighten its grip on the music business: not long after New Year, gossip is circulated about a streaming music service, storing users’ libraries on its own cloud servers rather than on computers, phones, pods or pads.

Meanwhile, the audio stuff has been left to makers of iPod docks, systems with iPod interfaces and the like: every one of them attracting a nice fee for Apple to get the official logos on the box. We have basic speaker docks, systems able to connect digitally to the portable devices for better sound than that available using an analogue connection (and thus the devices’ frankly fairly woeful onboard DACs), and of course iPod Touch/iPhone/iPad control apps, able to “drive” network-connected systems.

If all this wasn’t Applecentric enough, one manufacturer even makes an app whose sole purpose is to make your iPhone’s interface look like one of its products when you’re playing music: take a bow, McIntosh!

However, AirPlay – the latest iTunes wrinkle – looks like it may have serious implications for wireless music in the home. It started out innocently enough, as a means of connecting your iWhatever portable library to another computer, or a streaming device such as the latest Apple TV (another of Apple’s desirable home content devices, but this time firmly focused on online rentals of movies and other content for playback via the TV). Play your music, or film, on your iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad, and with a couple of clicks of your fingers – well, flicks of your finger, but you get the idea – you can “throw” it onto a device for wireless playback.

Apple’s now signing up some of the big names in home audio to the system: for example, if you own selected Denon, Marantz or JBL products you can pay a premium of around £40 to have them AirPlay enabled, so your music (or video) can be streamed through them from your portable device. Listen to music through those little earbuds while walking from the station, or via your car’s iInterface, and as you walk into the house you can flick the music onto your main audio system (almost) seamlessly.

Bowers & Wilkins has become the first big audio name to launch a dedicated AirPlay product: the new Zeppelin Air version of its popular, and stylish, ovoid iPod speaker system, seen above, can also stream music wirelessly from Mac or PC computers.

What’s more, you could have a Zeppelin Air in each room of the house, and stream music to all of them simultaneously from a single device. That’s getting consumer electronics manufacturers and Apple excited, and one or two companies making established multiroom systems a tad nervous: if you can do all this with something included in AV receivers, speaker systems or even your TV, will people want to buy a dedicated multiroom music system?

It seems Apple hasn’t finished with the way we buy, store and play music just yet…

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