Clive Akass, Personal Computer World, Tuesday 28 October 2008 at 10:00:00
Network music player and internet radio offering high-quality audio
Logitech is best known for input devices, but it bought into audio-networking technology two years back with the purchase of California-based Slim Devices.
The Squeezebox Boom music player is the latest of a range that originated with that company.
You can use it to play tracks stored on your PC, or to access music services such as Last.fm, MP3tunes, Radiotime, Radio IO and Live365. It can also play internet radio.
The audio quality from the 30W speakers is very good rather too good for MP3-compressed files to do it any justice. But the Squeezebox also supports AAC, WMA, Ogg, FLAC, Apple lossless, WMA lossless, WAV and AIFF formats.
Network access can be either via 802.11b/g Wifi, allowing you to move the box easily from room to room, or via the wired Ethernet port. Controlling the device through the supplied remote, or a navigation knob on the front of the box, can be rather cumbersome.
This is almost a generic fault with dedicated internet players as a small LCD panel is not the ideal medium for navigating a world of sound, but it is exacerbated on the Squeezebox by a rather eccentric menu structure.
Six buttons beneath the panel offer one-push access to your favourite radio stations or playlists; you configure these from your PC using the supplied Squeezecenter software. This also provides access to tracks stored either on the PC, or on some other device on the network. However, the Squeezebox cannot play tracks directly from a network-attached storage device, which means your PC (or Mac) needs to be on to access them.
The Squeezebox Boom both looks and sounds impressive, and is part of a suite of devices allowing you to play different (or the same) music in multiple rooms from a single remote control.
