The new Bose SoundDock 10 should provide awesome music for your iPod. The latest addition to the five-year-old line of iPod docks will blow away most listeners with its sound quality. It's bigger, heavier, and pricier than earlier SoundDocks. This one costs $599 direct and ships Sept. 21, as does a drop-in a $149 Bluetooth audio module. It targets users, says Bose VP Phil Hess, "who want the sound quality of a primary music system for their iPod or iPhone." The existing Bose SoundDock Portable system ($399) and Bose SoundDock Series II ($299) remain in the line.

A Bose press conference without razzle-dazzle pull-back-the-curtain visuals is an unlikely as an Orange County rally with no one shouting, "Where's Obama's birth certificate?" Bose did not disappoint. Using New York's popular Per Se restaurant overlooking Central Park for the introduction Tuesday, Bose hid the not-yet-unveiled unit behind a drape roughly the size of a bathroom shower curtain - suggesting a big audio system - and the environmental music coming forth - rainfall, thunder - indeed sounded a lot like a good home audio system. Then, voila! A Bose product manager pulled aside the curtain and revealed a tabletop device measuring 9-by-17-by-10 inches (HWD) making all that noise. It weighs 19 pounds, roughly a third of that coming from a low-frequency transducer that drives sound through a 52-inch wave guide. Bose says it gives the same effect as a 75-inch wave guide. There are also two tweeter-midrange drivers that Bose calls Twiddlers. It's all driven and shaped by a Bose-developed digital signal processor. Based on the initial Bose demo playing classical and jazz music (ripped as uncompressed WAV files), most users will be happy with the system's ability to fill a living room, dorm room, or back-yard patio with listenable sound that can be played at much higher levels that older SoundDock units.

The  back of the unit has a line-in jack for connecting other music devices and a composite video-out jack for playing music videos on your TV. It runs on AC-power only, not batteries, with the transformer built in (no wall wart). Despite the lack of surround sound - this is a stereo system not 5.1 or simulated surround - it will improve the audio of most any TV if you use the SoundDock 10 as the speaker system. There's also a small, infrared remote that sends commands to the SoundDock 10, but it doesn't show what's playing (no LCD display). For that, you'll want to consider using an iPhone or music-playing Smartphone via Bluetooth A2DP (Advanced Audio Distribution Profile).

What's missing? An obvious add-on module would be a USB connector so you could play music keys and possibly non-iPod USB-compatible devices such as Microsoft Zune. No product has much market share other than Apple, but with the total number of music players on the high side of 300 million worldwide, most compatible via USB, it's still a market in the millions.  In Europe, which has more phones with streaming Bluetooth (A2DP), the Bose SoundDock 10 will ship with both the Bluetooth and iPod modules at a not-yet-established price.

At this price, Bose is bumping up against the Sonos system, which draws music off a file server - probably the same music that's on an iPod - and plays through loudspeakers. It has a two-way remote with a very iPod-like display, but it lacks the one-piece portability of the SoundDock.