The B&W Zeppelin impresses as soon as you take it out of the box. It’s a solid speaker with good weight behind it, 7.5 kilograms in all. And it’s a ripper design as well. The Zeppelin is, unsurprisingly, designed to mimic the shape of the famous airships most commonly remembered for the Hindenburg’s ill-fated flight. Unlike its airship cousin, the Zeppelin is almost without flaw. The front is black while the rear where all the ports (S-video, audio-in, USB, composite-in) are is chrome. A chrome half-U shaped arm for the iPod dock juts out of the front but looks stunning.

Unpacking is a breeze. There’s one Zeppelin, one power cord, and one remote control. Set up, as you can imagine, is Cletus simple. Of all the problems we encountered with the Zeppelin, they all started here but ended briefly. Attaching your iPod can be a slight pain. The dock is at an odd angle and it takes some force to attach the iPod. If you don’t press down hard enough your music will play but it won’t come through completely.

Once our iPod was in, we encountered a further problem when the Zeppelin refused to recognise an iPod was attached. Disconnecting the power cord and reconnecting it remedied the problem. After that we couldn’t have been more impressed by B&W’s first attempt at an iPod speaker system (funny blue light on the left side speaker aside).