Digital Trends

XtremeMac Luna June 19th, 2007 | by Jason Tomczak

Setup and Use

Setting up the Luna is easy. The product packaging contains the Luna, power cord, remote, AM & FM antennae and limited product documentation.

Remove the Luna from its box and place it on a night stand, side table or desk (wherever you plan to use it). Plug it in to an outlet. Use the silver control knobs located in each corner to set the date and time. As necessary, continue setting up the Luna with alarm settings, screen brightness, etc.

When you're ready to test your iPod on the Luna, pop in the appropriate dock adapter and dock your iPod on the Luna. The Luna remote won't control the iPod's menu for music selection, so you'll have to manually select some tunes to listen to. Volume controls are on the Luna (silver knob) or on the Luna remote control. Adjust bass and treble to your liking. If you ever get frustrated by your bass/treble settings, you can always reset settings using the "reset" button on the remote. As mentioned elsewhere, this brings the bass and treble settings back to factory defaults.

One cool thing that the Luna allows is the navigation of playlists using the remote. You can toggle between weekend easy-wakie music or workday jolts - whatever you prefer.

XtremeMac Luna w/iPod Shuffle Docked

Sound Test

With everything set up, navigate to one of your favorite playlists and press play on the remote. In my tests, iTunes songs (both standard and iTunes Plus) and home-ripped MP3 files sounded pretty good for a clock radio. Typical clock radios give tinny, crappy 2-watt sound, so the Luna blew the norm to smithereens.

After testing the Luna for several days, I was able to get a solid handle on how the speakers perform. As mentioned above, the Luna has only two speakers and 20 watts overall, so it's obviously better than most iPod clock radios. Comparing the Luna to other popular iPod speaker systems such as the XtremeMac Tango, I thought the Luna was pretty weak. The Luna's bass was clear and sure, but it just didn't have any real depth or spirit. The mids and highs, however, were a lot better.

Because the Luna has been lauded as a revolutionary product and certainly because it was produced by XtremeMac, I thought it would be a lot better. It is, however, better than most other iPod clock radio systems. I suppose the main issue I have is the disparity between the "revolutionary" and "outstanding audio" descriptors used in marketing and the actual real-world audio playback, which is good to really-good, but not certainly amazing or outstanding. 

Pushing My Buttons

One of the prettier features of the Luna also happens to be an unexpected and undesirable flaw. The sleek silvery buttons on the top of the Luna control nearly every feature and function available. The very first night I set it up in my bedroom, I did so at about midnight when my wife was already asleep. I pressed the "Alarm 1" button to set the first alarm, and the button depressed with a loud "click! clack!". It was loud enough that it woke my wife up. I apologized and continued to configure the Luna. "Click, clack! ... click, clack! ... click, clack!" Over and over, no less than a dozen loud click-clacks in the still of the night as I was setting up the morning alarms. Not only were the buttons terribly noisy, they were somewhat hard to accurately control. They seemed to rotate well, but the rotation and tactile feedback didn't always coincide with the on-screen menu. Because of this, it is easy to over and under-navigate, making the setup and reconfig process a bit tiring.

I was very surprised that a high-tech bedside clock/radio - one that is described as a revolutionary device - could sound so unpleasantly loud when pushing simple buttons. At midnight or 1AM, when sounds are so amplified, I might as well have been popping bubble wrap. Should the engineers at XtremeMac take this into consideration and silence the buttons and make them a little more accurate in a future Luna revision, the otherwise wonderful design would end up being close to flawless.