Digital Trends

XtremeMac Tango April 20th, 2007 | by Jason Tomczak

Setup and Use

Setting up the Tango is very easy. Upon opening the product packaging, it's clear to see that there are few parts to worry about. The box contains the Tango and in small, separate boxes are the power cord, several foreign plug adapters, the wireless remote, three universal iPod dock adapters, and a nicely presented packet of product documentation.

After removing the Tango from its box and placing it in an acoustically-friendly location, plug it into an outlet. Be thankful that the Tango doesn't have a bulky power brick. Find the proper iPod dock adapter for your iPod. (Unfortunately for me, XtremeMac only supplied an adapter for the first-gen nano, so I had to use a spare second-gen nano adapter from my office.) Once your iPod is docked on the Tango, retrieve the remote control.

Although the remote is slightly larger than I would have expected, I was surprised that it had bass and treble controls in addition to the standard power, volume, forward, back, play, and pause buttons. It also has a nifty "R" button to instantly return the Tango back to default/neutral settings. At first I thought it was a superfluous feature, but I've already used it a dozen times. It's pretty cool.

The only thing missing from the remote is a button to control navigation through the iPod's menus. To change artists or playlists, one needs to navigate the menus on the iPod itself. This is a bummer for folks who don't want to (or can't) get up to change tunes. Why didn't XtremeMac include such a critical and obvious feature?

With everything set up, navigate to one of your favorite playlists and press play on the remote. In my tests, the very first song I played, “The Safety Dance,” sounded sort of bland. I thought it was odd, so I checked my iPod settings and discovered that the EQ setting had somehow been changed. I set the EQ back to "Off" and tried playing the song again. It was awesome! Bass, mids, and treble sounded lively and authentic. I skipped forward to Bjork, Ice-T, INXS, Nelly Furtado, and Akvarium, all of which sounded fantastic.

When turning the Tango off via the remote, any music that's currently playing fades to silent, then the unit turns off. When turning the Tango back on with the remote, the previously selected song begins playing again, this time increasing gradually to the previous volume level. If, for whatever reason, the previous volume level was way too loud, you won't scare the crap out of yourself or your neighbors with an instant explosion of music. You'll have a couple seconds to halt the volume at an acceptable level. No more ringing eardrums or startled neighbors.