Wifi | media|STREAMERS

Category Archives: Wifi

Categories:

Philips NP1100 Streamium

NP1100 The Philips Streamium system has been extended with an internet radio, not entirely unlike the SLA5500 mentioned in the Terratec Noxon article. This time, however, the device looks a lot more together – it’s got a bit of bling, even. It doesn’t appear to support lossless encoding but it does recognize uPnP services on the network and connects both wirelessly and with twisted pair. On the output side there are 2 analogue outputs, headphone and line out, as well as a coax for digital connectivity.

Philips

Thomas Nielsen

July 15, 2008

0 Comments

Categories:

Chord QBD76 DAC

QBD76 I mentioned the Chordette Gem earlier. Now this little diamond has spawned a big brother in the Chord QBD76 DAC. The QBD76 is a truly high end DAC as you would expect from Chord Electronics. The major addition to DACs in general and its predecessor alike, is a the very same thing that makes the Chordette Gem so original – Bluetooth reception. An abundance of digital inputs, including USB, makes it a versatile hub in your audio system even so; but Bluetooth A2DP support now adds your mobile phone to the equation.

Incidentally. If you remember the old Flash Gordon comics, do you not hear Dr. Zarkov exclaim while straightening his back and pointing: “Duck Flash! That rocket ship is armed with a QBD76!”?

Categories:

Sooloos

The Sooloos system consists of three different components. The Store which is the actual disk, the Source which streams the music to up to 32 zones and the Control which is a 17” touch screen with a built in CD drive [“Music isn’t all zones, terabytes, and signal-to-noise ratios”, they say]. Additional controls in the form of a 7” remote or a 7” satellite are available.

The Sooloos is the second system I have come across that uses mirroring on its datastore. Considering that hopefully more and more music will be downloadable in lossless audio formats the backup implications become more challenging; in case of a disk crash, how do you get your music back? A CD is straight forward. Buy it again and rip it once more. With music from, let’s say the B&W Music Club, you are in a jam. You cannot simply redownload music from previous months. A backup is actually a very good thing to consider in these days of digital distribution.

An interesting and rather important point with the Sooloos system is that CDs are ripped as one large file rather than individual tracks. This ensures that when songs or, perhaps more importantly, musical movements are played in order, they are played with exactly the gaps they were supposed to. If you play individual tracks they are seeked at runtime, so the obvious shortcoming of this method has been taken care of.

Sooloos

Thomas Nielsen

June 27, 2008

0 Comments

Categories:

Pinnacle Audio athenaeum

athenaeum I think the guys at Bel Canto may have had a finger in the soup when Pinnacle Audio named this raw beast. House of Athena? Whichever way you look at it, it is a beautiful name for a device that would more aptly be called a machine.

The athenaeum holds up to 4 750GB harddisks for a total of 3TB of disk space and unlike any other streamer I know of [at least of the type befitting this blog] supports RAID1. Supported file format include Flac and Ogg-Vorbis but it can rip to MP3 and AAC as well. The device is managed from a web interface or from the included [wifi enabled] remote control with colour touch screen.

The athenaeum has a smaller sister called folio. The folio has roughly the same specs but has only 2 fixed disks instead of 4 replaceable. It comes in 2x250GB, 2x500GB and 2x750GB flavours. Ample space for most, even in Flac.

Oh, and guess what?! The brochure for the athenaeum quotes Henry VIII… “In sweet music is such art”. Could it be an ode to miss Capulet?

Categories:

Chordette Gem

British audiophile magazine What Hi-Fi? just released a quick news article on their web about an interesting device from Chord Electronics [otherwise known for their insanely exquisite high end audio components] – the Chordette Gem. The device is something as ingenious and yet so simple as a Bluetooth DAC. The idea is that you stream music from your mobile phone via Bluetooth. For more orthodox purposes it offers a USB socket as well.

Categories:

Tivoli Audio NetWorks

Tivoli Audio are known for some of the coolest table top radios on the market in general and for Henry Kloss’ design in particular. They too have jumped on the wagon and done a streaming piece of art with their new NetWorks.

NetWorks streams internet radio stations as well as playing FM radio and DAB. Supported file formats include MP3 and WMA. It is unclear if lossless formats are supported but unlike most others it supports Real Audio.

Sonos Digital Music System

The Sonos Digital Music System is more than just a streamer. It consists of a server connected via twisted pair to your network and a controller with a color display. The server relays music to other Sonos devices via their own proprietary wireless network optimized for audio. All Sonos devices can play either their own playlists or play in sync. Everything controlled from the neat little handheld remote.

If you have more than one device only one of them needs to be physically connected to the network. The others receive their data wirelessly from there. There are three different types of devices to choose from: The ZoneBridge that does nothing except bridge the physical and wireless network – an access point, if you will, and two ZonePlayers that have actual playing capabilities. One of these ZonePlayers comes with a built in amplifier – the other without. In my book it is the latter that is most interesting. You simply connect it to your existing system – maybe even with a Benchmark Dac1 for conversion.

The entire system is controlled from up to 32 controllers or from a PC using some cool looking software – very nicely laid out.

Sonos

Thomas Nielsen

June 13, 2008

0 Comments

Categories:

Freecom MusicPal

With their MusicPal internet radio, Freecom shows a fairly classy looking albeit, barebone device. Like the Terratec Noxon, it is designed to stream internet radio stations, music from your computer or from a network attached disk. It supports Wav, WMA and MP3, and recognizes uPnP servers on the network. It has both wired and wireless network connectivity and outputs both to headphones and music system.

There are two things that makes the MusicPal stand out from the crowd, though. It can show RSS feeds on its small LCD screen and, what is really nifty, it has a built in alarm clock… you can actually use it to wake up in the morning with your favourite artist – figuratively speaking.

There is no support for Flac or Ogg-Vorbis.

Freecom

Thomas Nielsen

May 26, 2008

0 Comments

Categories:

Arcus DAR300

dar300 Esteemed Arcus has a potent player in the game of CD ripping audio servers. This one can copy CD onto its internal hard drive, back it up onto a network attached storage and play it back in a number of formats, including Flac and Ogg-Vorbis.

Wireless communication is done using a USB Wifi dongle. Not exactly elegant but at least it lets you move the antenna to higher ground for good reception. Identifying itself over uPnP, other streaming clients can take advantage of the device.

Arcus

Thomas Nielsen

May 26, 2008

0 Comments

Categories:

Logitech Squeezebox Duet

This is a clever device, in that it detaches navigation from the device completely and uses only the remote. The remote control has a small color LCD display which shows everything from playlists to album cover artwork. More Squeezeboxes can be linked together between rooms and either play different tracks or in-sync.

Just like with the Transporter, Logitech-owned Slim Devices once more shows true excellence in spec writing. One thing, however, they managed to keep somewhat hidden, is the fact that the Duet [unlike the Transporter] only supports streaming from their own SqueezeCenter server software. You cannot, in other words, stream from just any media enabled NAS disk or directly from a file server.

Like its bigger brother it supports Flac and Ogg-Vorbis. Indeed a neat device, even considering its obvious short coming.

Squeezebox Duet

« Older Entries

Newer Entries »

		Barebone device
		Cheap good featured
		Actual hi-fi device
		High end hi-fi
		Out of this world
CD drive		Wifi
Flac audio		Digital IO
Ogg-Vorbis		uPnP support
Video

Please note that the ratings are not objective in any way nor are they a measure for quality. They are a measure for what I think the target group for the device was intended to be; my expectations if you will.