There's just no way around it: If you want chest-thumpin' bass, then you need to push a lot of air through a long chamber. If you want to go cordless for extended periods, you need a pile of heavy batteries inside. If you want it to look really cool, you buy from a company with a history of excellent product designs.

Behold the Altec Lansing iM7, a radical rethink that turns the whole boombox thing on its ear. It's expensive ($249), bulky (16.75"x 6.25"), heavy (11 pounds with eight D-size alkaline batteries installed) -- and sounds absolutely, positively glorious.

So good, in fact, that its only real competition is the $300 Bose SoundDock -- a truly superb system in its own right, but one that is not capable of operating on battery power, so it isn't truly portable in the way most people define the word. The $100 DLO iBoom, essentially a traditional AM/FM boombox with an iPod cradle grafted on, is a decent portable rig but it is not particularly loud nor is it even remotely hi-fi.

Nope, the Altec Lansing has this niche sewn up, for now. You want it room-filling loud, sweet on the high end and heavy on the low end? You want an iM7.

Every great beauty has a great flaw, they say. The iM7 has several, but none are deal breakers. As I mentioned, it's big and heavy, but it has to be to do what it does, so get over it. It's covered with steel mesh grilles, so it is only a matter of time before they get all dented up, but that could be kind of cool, too, depending on how obsessive-compulsive you are. It has bass and treble controls on the remote but not on the iM7 itself, and there are no indicators to tell you where "flat response" is -- you have to guess. The headphone jack is inconveniently placed on the back. Worst of all, while the iM7 powers and recharges your iPod when it's in the cradle, there is no dock connector to sync with iTunes on your Mac or PC. A big, great-sounding audio system like this will end up on plenty of desks and never move, and those desks are extremely likely to double as computer workspaces. The lack of a dock connector is a real forehead slapper of a design gaffe -- iM7.1, anyone?

Yet, the unit does have another, quite unexpected feature that takes some of the sting out of that slap, or may even stay your hand altogether: video outputs. Yes, if your iPod supports photo syncing, your can send them right out via RCA composite video or S-Video cable. If your color iPod didn't come with the Apple iPod AV Cable, you just saved $19. The remote even lets you control the slide advance. Nice touch, most welcome.

Great sound can only come from great speakers, fed by signals properly split into the frequency ranges supported by each speaker. Rest assured, Altec Lansing knows a thing or two about speakers. This unit has a pair of 1-inch tweeters, a pair of 3-inch midranges drivers, and a single 4-inch woofer at the right end of the cannon, pushed through the length of the chamber so the lows can develop more fully while the left end acts as a passive radiator, theoretically balancing any perceived asymmetry in the stereo field. It's really hard to tell where bass frequencies are coming from anyway -- however it measures in the lab, the iM7 sounds really, really good at any volume level.

I wouldn't want to pack this rig on a trip, nor would it be my first choice to take camping. It's too portly and too pretty for either. But for almost any size domestic or office room situation, a backyard or a park, this is the portable iPod audio system that makes all the others look rather common. --David MacNeill

$249 from alteclansing.com

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