The iPod had a monumental impact on how people listened to music. Not only did it turn people onto digital music downloads, rather than CDs, better than any preceding product; it also made listening to playlists and to shuffled music simple and extremely popular. The iPod’s 30-pin connector had a huge impact on home speaker systems as well. Suddenly, it became the default connection option for a bevy of home speakers. In stores, many speaker systems were repealed by iPod speaker docks.

While I had iPods since the first iPod Mini was released, shortly after I got married, I got an iPod Touch. It came for for free with my wife’s first MacBook Pro, and she had no interest in it. Of course, as a non-iPhone-owner, I found the iPod Touch to be an incredible upgrade from my iPod Nano. Around the same time, I got my first iPod speaker dock for free as well, in exchange for writing a review. It was a Philips Revolution speaker dock that looked somewhat like a boombox, could be driven by a bunch of D-cells or a power cord, and had a rotating dock that could accommodate (in portrait or in landscape mode) every iPod created to date and the first generation iPhone.

For sound, it was perfectly adequate. I liked it a lot at the time, but I thought of it like a boombox rather than a room-filling speaker system. It lacked a subwoofer, and thus had lackluster bass, but it was small, battery powered, and brought music into places in our apartment that it previously didn’t reach. My wife and I enjoyed using it with the iPod Touch for streaming music—mainly Pandora or streaming radio from WNYC—in the dining room while we ate dinner. I really enjoyed using it for background music during meals or for news radio, for which having the richest and best audio quality was not terribly important.

In the same way that my computer, once I got a CD-ROM drive, supplanted the stereo system as my main music player, this speaker system solidified the iPod’s (and later the iPhone’s) prime position as the source for music in my house. It also got me into the habit of streaming audio into the house, rather than only playing previously downloaded (or ripped) music. My wife and I used it in our kitchen for years to stream WNYC news and music. When the iPhone changed from the 30-pin connector to the Lightning connector however, this speaker dock’s days were numbered. And when that original iPod Touch’s software support was dropped by Apple, this speaker dock’s days were done.