Sleek, powerful and boasting surprisingly good audio: Michael Oryl gets hands-on with Philips' new home audio streaming solution, the Streamium WACS700, at CES.
The Philips Streamium WACS700 Wireless Music Center is a new 802.11g streaming media system being promoted by Philips here at CES 2005 in Las Vegas. What the Streamium 700 does is play and rip your music CDs, creating MP3 files it stores on its built-in 40 GB hard disk. The music is available immediately on the main station as soon as you drop the CD into the top slot - the 700 plays as it encodes.
The Streamium 700 makes use of a preloaded music database that contains track title and artist information, much as you see with PC based music rippers. But unlike your PC, which requires a live Internet connection to get this information, the Streamium stores this information on its hard disk. When you want to update the database, you use an included PC application to burn a new CD ROM that you can then just drop into the main Streamium unit. The database is read from the CD and used when you rip new CDs.
In addition to the main Streamium 700 unit, each system comes with one remote station included. Up to 5 separate remote stations can be linked to the main unit, and each remote unit can access and play anything stored on the main unit. They can all play the same music at the same time (good for parties), or they can each play their own tracklists.
The main Streamium 700 station has an 80 watt amplifier that it uses to pump sound through the novel looking flat-panel speakers. The remote units have 20 watt amps and use the same sized speakers in an overall smaller package. Audio quality was surprisingly good for what look like hard plastic speakers, and both treble and bass response were quite impressive.
Both the main and remote stations each have their own remote controls. The main unit's remote even has a 6 line LCD display on it, so that you can navigate through your music collection as if you were standing there. Another cool feature of the Streamium 700 system is the follow-me mode that let's your currently playing music follow you to a different station at the push of a button.
In addition to the ability to play MP3 files it has ripped itself, the Streamium 700 can also access MP3 files stored on your PC; provided they are on the same network. You can also use your PC to organize the playlists for later use on the Streamium 700. And if you happen to tire of your thousands of MP3 files, there's always the built-in AM/FM radio receiver.
The basic package, which will retail for about $899 USD, includes the main Streamium station and one remote station. Additional remote stations cost about $299 USD. The system should be available for sale in April or May of this year.
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