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Price: £600
More info: Hermstedt
Size (WxHxD): 435x85x290mm
Weight: 4.3kg
Hard drive: 80GB (160GB also available)
Connections: WLAN, 4x Ethernet, 1x USB (1x USB 1.0, 1x USB 2.0), analogue RCA line input, digital optical/coaxial output
Audio formats: MP3 and MP3 VBR, AIFF, PCM, WAV, FLAC, Ogg Vorbis (playback only), AAC (playback only)
Recording/playback sampling rate: 44,100Hz
Disc formats: CD, CD-R, CD-RW
Plus points:
Clean, simple multi-room solution, good looks, easy set-up
Minus points:
Compromised CD sound,
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Banish thoughts of bedroom-sized audio furniture from the seventies with wood laminate surrounds and thumb-straining buttons. The Hermstedt Hifidelio music centre is a decidedly more modern beast. Specifically, it's a Wi-Fi-enabled CD player with a hard drive which you can use as an easy storage device for your music collection or as the basis of a multi-room system.
In these convergence days, the idea of a single device that will not only play your CDs but store them too is very tempting. Yes, we know that's what PCs do, but they rarely fit in with the look of a hi-fi system, and they're generally not optimized for audiophile playback. Hermstedt's Hifidelio however, does, and is - up to a point.
The German-based company is more often associated with ISDN-based corporate file-transfer solutions (moving data for the likes of Apple, basically), but has nevertheless managed to produce a decent looking, sounding and acting option for multi-room entertainment.
It looks like a classy piece of kit, all minimalist silvery sheen (it's also available in black), with car-style slide-in disc drive, and a range of attractively illuminated CD play controls. The display is functional, and large enough to be read at a little distance, though its rather plain monochrome LCD looks a bit more Tesco alarm clock than cutting-edge audiophile interface.
You can navigate the menus using the scroll wheel, which features an additional rotating ring on the outside and four buttons next to the screen, but we found it easier to use the remote control, which you can also use to rename faulty name tags, using the numeric keypad rather like texting on a mobile phone.
The Hifidelio includes a database of track info to around 2 million (it uses the FreeDB database) and can generally fill in all the necessary album and track info before you even connect it to the internet. Once hooked up to the net however it will automatically collect the latest downloads from the database, so it's always up to date. The remote looks a bit cheap, incidentally, as is often the way with these things. An LCD screen which mirrors the display on the Hifidelio might have helped too, especially if you don't plan on sitting too close to it.
There's a brace of USB connections (USB 1.0 and 2.0) which you can use to hook it up directly to an iPod or other MP3 player, or even a computer keyboard, which can help with inputting track information. Ideally though, you'll connect it to a PC which will allow you to get the most out of it.
You can connect to the internet using one of the four Ethernet ports at the back, or via an 802.11g Wi-Fi connection. Wi-Fi also allows you to transfer your existing digital music from your PC to the Hifidelio, which should be connected to your proper hi-fi system, as opposed to those dinky little powered speakers you run off your PC. This is easily done using the import function. It doesn't work so easily the other way round however, copying ripped CDs from the Hifidelio onto your PC, although you can create another copy.
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Performance
The Hifidelio not only plays CDs of course, but can also rip them to its hard drive. It does this in slightly odd way, by copying the tracks in full first, then converting them to your compressed codec of choice. It offers a range of burn options, including memory-hungry WAV, lossless compression format FLAC, cult codec Ogg Vorbis and megabit-efficient but sonically inferior MP3. It will play AAC too, the favoured codec of iTunes devotees, but won't rip your CDs into it. You can rip CDs at 8x speed, which also allows you to play them back while you're ripping, or high-speed 16x.
The argument for the rip-first, convert-later approach is that you can listen to your music quicker, while the conversion carries on in the background. Not really a problem when you've still got plenty of space on the hard drive, but as it fills up you could find yourself needing a clean-out before you were expecting it.
The Hifidelio also gives you a multi-room option, since you can stream tracks to it from your PC, and the other way round of course. You can even link up several Hifidelios at once, in a Sonos or Philips Streamium style. It won't play DRM-protected tunes purchased from the iTunes store.
There are a few nods to hi-fi audiophilia, such as the gold-plated RCA line inputs (it also comes with a set of gold-plated analogue interconnects for hooking up to an amp) and Harmstedt's 'smooth supply' power system which aims to reduce noise from the power supply. There is some noise from both the hard drive and the CD player however - not the sort of thing you would commonly expect from a high-end device, though thankfully there's no PC-style fan to make a racket.
CD playback isn't quite what you'd expect from a decent dedicated player. The sound quality was okay but it was noticeably inferior to that of the Exposure 2010 CD player that we used for comparison.
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The Hifidelio certainly isn't the best CD player we've heard, and it doesn't quite have the fit and forget simplicity of the Sonos wireless multi-room system. But as a reasonable spec CD player with the added convenience of 80GB of storage (or 160 for the 800 Pro version) and wireless multi-room capability it's a very neat and very capable, if slightly pricey, solution.
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