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October 25, 2005
On Choosing a Digital Media (Music) Adapter
These devices stream your media files from a centralized storage over the home network to the player (also called Streaming Media Adapter or Wireless Media Player). They are available from a plethora of companies from the networking side (Linksys, Netgear, D-link), consumer electronics side (Philips, Sony) and the PC/peripheral side (HP, Creative, Turtle Beach). The devices use an underlying device discovery and communication standard called UPnP AV.
I have been storing all my music (and photos though this rant is all about music) on a linux file server at home for about six years now. It is great to be able to access my personal media from all the PCs throughout the house. For the music, it would be great to have a small, simple device to put in smaller rooms, say my bedroom or bathroom, that could access and playback the music. Twonky Vision's TwonkyVision Media Server (gotta tell them to come up with a better name) is a Linux-based UPnP media server that is available for free but the device player side of things is seriously lacking. The only device that comes close from a feature standpoing (though not quality) is the Linksys WMLS11B Digital Media Streamer...which seems to have been silently end-of-lifed. It no longer shows up on the Linksys site through the standard user interface (only through a search). The only thing right was the feature list and price. The speaker quality was terrible producing a tiny sound and the UPnP implementation was so basic it made browsing painful.
The rest of the products on the market either must be attached via RCA (or optical) jacks to a stereo system or are very bulky (read: expensive) such as the Philips Streamium boombox. My biggest complaint with the traditional music streaming adapters is the size of display -- 2 or 3 lines of an LCD. It is so time consuming to scroll through 200GB of compressed audio on 2 lines of a display. The only usefulness of such a product is with content that is programmed elsewhere like the great Pandora or Internet radio stations. It doesn't help that the devices don't have any Flash memory to store the remote list of music and its metadata but has to retrieve it each time. Perhaps this is a limitation of UPnP. The Creative Labs' product overcomes the display size issue by putting the UI on the RF remote control and they give you about ten lines. Unfortunately, it only attaches to an existing stereo system.
I still haven't come across the ideal product that offers all-in-one (wireless, audio amplification and speakers), quality sound, a good and quick UI ...oh, and all a decent price. If you find one, please comment.
Posted by raza at October 25, 2005 12:53 PM
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