Oh woe is you. You have such great tunes and playlists on your iPod MP3 player, but you can't share your sounds with other people in a group-listening session. Well, there are actually plenty of ways you can do that. Including, if you are prepared to spend £249, via the i-deck.

This is a system comprising a pair of speakers and a central amplifier unit. You drop your iPod into a slot and play tunes through the speakers. The i-deck charges your mobile music player as it goes, which is handy.

More handy than this, though, is the fact that the system comes with plug-in holders that allow it to cater for various different iPods. It's pretty easy to change them as required. The i-deck is currently compatible with a wide range of iPod models, and the Nano has been added since we first heard about the kit.

If you have a non-compatible device, such as the iPod Shuffle which uses a different connector type (in this case a standard USB connector) you can use the provided 3.5mm audio jack which will work with anything that has 3.5mm audio out. If you want to use the i-deck as a permanent dock near your computer, then the back of the main unit has a connector for PC or Mac link via either USB or Firewire.

The speakers connect to the main unit via bare wire cables which are both 1.5 metres long. We'd have liked more length; after all, this is not inexpensive kit.

We were similarly nonplussed by the remote control unit, which is small and feels rather tacky in the hand. It provides minimal control, just powering the system on and off, providing forward and back track control and volume management. There's no access to deeper stuff within the iPod menu system such as equaliser settings, which have to be fiddled with by, oh the shock of it, making the trek over to your iPod and using its own on-board controls! You will have to use the iPod's equaliser for sound control, too, as there is none on the i-deck itself.

Sound quality, to our untrained but critical ears, is really very good. We tried a mix of rock, jazz and classical music and found that tunes were delivered with nicely rounded tones. Ratcheting the volume right up did result in some distortion, but it was too loud for comfortable listening at that volume anyway. Or perhaps we're getting old.

One other point worth noting is that this is physically large kit. The speakers and central amp unit each measure 20cm tall by 14.5cm wide, and have a backwards-lean to their design which means they need about 20cm of shelf depth. The upshot is that you are going to have to make serious space for this kit, which is ironic since your iPod has no doubt allowed you to clear space by putting all your CDs away into storage.

£250 is a lot of money to spend on an iPod accessory, especially when a basic audio-out cable will deliver music through the auxiliary input of your main stereo system (provided, of course, that you have a system with aux inputs). The good news is that sound quality is impressive and the kit looks quite tasty too.