Goodbye to cd's and their clutter, hello to superb wireless sound quality in all rooms and those re-discovering lost gems.

Install the software on your pc, fill the hard disk with music, connect an SB3 to your hi-fi and stream away. Select your music via the remote, web browser, mobile phone, PSP or, like me, a wireless tablet laptop with full song details and album artwork.

Had mine for a few months and these are my current stats 778 albums with 11196 songs by 473 artists, now imagine that on random play, whether by genre, year, artist, song or album. Are you getting the picture yet?
Fancy a party? then call up a random mix of tunes and select 'crossfade' they will all be mixed together with no gaps. Or give a remote to the guests and they can select their own songs from the 1000's available.

And I havn't even mentioned the plug in's you can add yet.
SB3 really is a superb bit of kit, much better than a Roku Soundbridge and other network/wireless players.

Get one in, you won't regret it.

Hi Robert, we'll be doing a group test of audio streaming devices soon on AVR and we hope to include the Squeezebox. Hopefully we'll get on with it as well as you have!

I have a SB3 opticalled into my Denon AVC11 amp from my pc running off a 1TB Lacie external drive, now have 8100 albums stored and although the amount is a bit hard to navigate through the interface and sound quality from 320kps tracks are just like a high end cd player.
I recommend the Squeezebox to any one if you have even a small digital music collection.
I payed £180.00 for my wired unit.

Shame the Sonos wasn't in the group. Nice to see the review though and there were no other obvious omissions.

Can any of these work from a NAS without the PC being switched on?

Hi Christopher, cheers for your post. We did consider the new Sonos ZP80 for the group test, but in the end we felt that its higher price bracket (£600 with controller) meant it wasn't quite appropriate for this particular review. However, we did review the older amplified version a few months back. Take a look here:

http://www.avreview.co.uk/news/article.asp?UAN=458&v=1&sp=

Regarding your question, unfortunately we didn't get the chance to try any of these streamers through a NAS. Having had a brief look into it I'd say it was doubtful, but I'll try and get in contact with the manufacturers to see if they can give me a definite answer.

Cheers,

Al

Alex,

That reasoning makes sense. Yes, it is a lot more expensive.

I think that the weakness of the current state of the art is that most people are just not going to want to leave a PC on permanently. That's where the Sonos scores in my view.

We're still waiting for the larger Ipod domestic equivalent.

The ROKU soundbridge is indeed a very nice device (I've got two). HOWEVER... The Pinnacle rebadged version is crippled - something that's been missed in this review.

The pinnacle version does not include a license for iTunes support, and while the hardware is identical (and iTunes actually works in some early samples) the latest Pinnacle soundbridge firmware will not work with iTunes. To confuse matters Pinnacle have seriously mis-communicated this, and are spinning the facts.

The Pinnacle soundbridge is a substandard product compared the Roku version - without iTunes support it looses it's primay feature which gives it an edge over the other packages. I'd suggust that the conclusions fo the review would be very different if this was taken into account.

The "full" Roku version is available in North America and some other territories.

Ian

Squeezebox TOO EXPENSIVE, get outta here.
It's an audiophile product at a premium price, the Burr Brown dacs and fantastic display are worth the extra. Not to mention better usability, laptop control in addition to the supplied remote, no upsampling to 48khz like the Soundbridge, better sound, I could go on.

As for Isheep, sorry Itunes, I don't download from them, too expensive and too restrictive.

And yes you can buy NAS devices to run Slimserver away from a pc, see QNAP, amongst others, visit Slimdevices forum for loads of help. I personally built a small case pc with a 250gb hd, works well.

Cheers for your posts guys - interesting stuff!! Couple of points in response...

Ian, we did actually manage to get the Pinnacle working directly with iTunes without the need for third party software, although as you say, maybe because we received an early sample copy. Talking to the PR agency responsible for Roku, they assured me that the Pinnacle version is absolutely no different from the Roku, and I took their word for that.

Robert, as stated in the review, we concluded the extra usability and superior screen of the Squeezebox definitely gives it the edge over the Pinnacle, although we'll still maintain that considering the wired version of the Squeezebox v3 costs around £180, then adding an extra £50 for wireless capability is a little unjustified.

I'm trialling the latest Sonos at the mo - should have a review up in the next week or two.

It's pretty clear how many of us are thinking of going this route given the speed that this thread has taken off.

Faster than most, it has to be said. It makes sense though, with so many of dabbling in MP3 (and hopefully lossless formats too) - we all want to be able to play our music with ease, anywhere we feel like it.
But there's the rub - who goes for convenience above all, who insists on the highest affordable sound quality and who prefers something in between?

There's a window in the market in the £800 to £2500 area. There simply isn't much for the typical Quad, Meridian or Linn customer.

Hi.
One important thing that hasn't been mentioned is to what quality you encoded your music in the first place.
I've spent ages fiddling around trying out different bit rates and encoders - I've ended up using Exact Audio Copy with the LAME encoder and rip everything at 320k.
I chose this because this seemed to be the consensus on the forums - not that I can really hear the difference one you get past 192k....
My thinking was that I only want to rip everything once so might as well go for the highest quality - disk space being cheap an' all...
What did you encode yours with/too?
I've been thinking of the Squeezebox myself, but haven't quite managed to get round to it yet.
Any other ideas on best codec, etc?
Steve

Hi Steve,

When testing audio quality, we mainly used 320kbps MP3 files. Certainly I would recommend 320kbps over 192. For iPod use you can't really tell the difference but through a quality pair of stereo speakers there is a noticeable improvement.

Al

I know a couple of people who are doing this or working towards it and we are all using lossless in some form. Either WAV or FLAC.

There are 2 reasons why I have bought the SB3:

WPA2 and native flac support.

ciao, TommyZ

I have the Roku M1000 and I can't believe how many people reckon the SB3 is better value!! Come on, £230 is loads to spend on just that extra fancy screen. No matter what brilliant DAC has been put in it, it's way overpriced compared to the Roku which in almost every way is as good and 80 quid cheaper!!

In any case most of my tunes are at 128kbps so I accept I'm not going to get audiophile sound quality through my Roku, but that's not what I bought it for - convenience was my number one priority.

These streamers look quite appealing although i don't really want to spend much more than £100. Does anyone know if the Philips supports WAV?

'fraid not Danny. You'll have to go for one of the higher priced ones if you want to stream uncompressed audio.