Slim Devices Squeezebox

The Squeezebox v3 is Slim Devices' latest entry in the newest genre of home audio products, the Media Server. What's a media server? It is the manifestation of the buzzword "convergence" that you may have heard bandied about by members of the technology press recently. It's a wedding ring for your computer and your stereo, translating the bits of data on your PC into beautiful music for your home stereo. OK, OK; sorry about all that cutesy talk: It's a nifty do-dad that allows to you play music stored on your computer on your home stereo.

These types of products have been around for a few years now, but they're still relatively new. The product up for review today is actually the third iteration of the Squeezebox, the first making its debut in late 2001.

I reviewed Apple's Airport Express a very similar product, in June of last year. Like the Squeezebox, it allows you to send music from your PC to your stereo via wireless 802.11g computer networking protocol ("Wi-Fi"). The Airport Express is a great product that I use regularly, but my biggest complaint is it's short feature set: it has no interface, no remote control, and you are completely dependent on your computer to use and control it. The Squeezebox has the same core functionality as the Airport (wireless audio), but the Squeezebox piles on the features, giving you everything that the Airport is missing: remote control, nice interface, better DAC, and many more great features. It also supports just about every major file format out there: the three major lossless formats - Apple Lossless, FLAC, and WMA Lossless, the big compression formats - AAC, MP3, WMA, Ogg Vorbis, MP2 and MusePack, and all of the uncompressed formats - PCM, AIFF and WAV. As a full convert to PC audio, it was the component I had been waiting for. I couldn't wait to take her out for a spin.

Installation/Setup

I wish I could say that set up of these devices was easy, but unfortunately, any time you're futzing with a wireless network, setup will not be plug and play. These are complicated little devices. That said, the Squeezebox does a pretty good job of walking you through setup.

First you have to install the SlimServer Software on your computer, which was simple and straightforward on my Mac, but it wasn't so smooth on either of my Windows XP PCs. On both XP machines, I could not get the SlimServer to actually launch upon initial installation of the slim server software. The tray icon consistently displayed the message "Starting SlimServer" but it never actually launched; it was constantly hung in this state. Strangely, simply uninstalling and reinstalling the software cured this issue on both machines, and I was able get it started. Next I installed the Squeezebox into my stereo, in my case a pair of Klipsch Cornwalls, an AES SuperAmp and a Yamaha Preamp.

Turn on the unit for the first time, and it guides you through a setup process: connecting to your network and looking for any instances of SlimServer running on your network. Once connected and ready to go, you can navigate your computer's music folders with remote, browsing by genre, artist, album, just like you would with your iPod. SlimServer also found my iTunes playlists. This was great, because it meant I didn't have to create new, duplicate playlists, which is actually my first complaint about the SlimServer software - compared to music players like winamp and itunes, building and managing playlists with the SlimServer is pretty tedious. SlimServer uses a simple html interface, which means that you control it through a page in your web browser. Not exactly the slickest out there.

Another one of the Squeezebox's cool features was the ability to natively stream internet radio stations - no computer required. I am absolutely hooked on the great variety offered by internet radio, so I was very excited about this feature. My next priority was loading my favorite stations into the player. The Squeezebox comes pre-populated with a wealth of cool stations from radioio.com, shoutcast.com, and live365, but I have a handful of others that I love and listen to daily.

Adding stations was something of a tedious process, and I had a hard time locating them from the player with the remote. Also, once again, it was a challenge trying to figure out how to add them to existing playlists. I realized that I could use the radio stations playlist I had created in iTunes, but this defeated the purpose of the native streaming radio ability of the Squeezebox, and besides that, it just didn't work very well. Listening to radio streams saved in iTunes playlists frequently caused the player to lock up completely, becoming totally unresponsive to remote commands. This was one heck of a defect. Each time this happened, I was forced to unplug the player and plug it back in, and even when I did this, upon restarting the Squeezebox would immediately go back to that station that had caused the lockup. As you can imagine, this drove me plenty crazy. This didn't just happen with radio stations in my itunes playlists either; it occasionally happened with stations hardcoded into the Squeezebox, albeit less frequently.

Listening

I'll get straight to the point here: despite the issues I encountered, sound quality was simply great. Those Burr-Brown DACs are for real. They make the Squeezebox sound as good as any CD player I have ever owned. It was quite impressive, and a nice surprise. Sound is non-fatiguing and clean across the frequency spectrum. Usually devices like this - moderately priced for mass consumption - leave much to be desired in terms of absolute audio performance. The audio performance tends to be an afterthought. The squeezebox proved to me without a doubt that it could hang in my system without being the limiting factor. In fact, at this years CES, I saw at least a couple high-end manufacturers using Squeezeboxes as their main source. Given some of the major system snobbery that goes on at the high-end show at CES, that's an impressive endorsement.

If the exceptional analog stage isn't good enough for you, well then, you're just a snob. Just kidding! There is also digital output available, in the form of both a full size coaxial and optical jack. With this you can connect to either your home theater receiver or a high-end Digital to Analog Converter (DAC). It also features a headphone jack so you can listen privately, bypassing the stereo altogether. I used the digital output a bit, but in my case, the Squeezeboxes' internal DAC sounded better than the built-in DAC in my old Yamaha Preamp, so I listened through the analog stage most of the time. The sound out of the digital output, however, was solid.

Issues

I had a lot of problems with my unit. Besides the issues I talked about earlier - initial installation on Windows XP, creating playlists and radio stations causing the unit to lock up, I also had problems with the remote. Remote responsiveness was terrible and sometimes non-existent. When attempting to push single button on the remote, trying to navigate the file system, the Squeezebox was either very slow to respond or did not respond at all. If I tried to push a few buttons in succession, sometimes it would wait a few seconds and then quickly land at my intended destination.

The Slim Devices support guy pointed to my model of router specifically as having known issues with remote responsiveness. Hey, I couldn't fault the Squeezebox for that. I have issues with my wireless router too. My main issue is that it's a piece of junk.

So I tried setting it up with another router. It appeared to connect to the network, but then the player could not detect the SlimServer running on my computer. OY. I looked through the help, and found a little comment about incompatibility when using a specific security setting. Lo and behold, my router was using that setting. I changed the setting, and all computers on the wireless network were disconnected and blocked out of the network. Great. I had to connect my laptop diretly to the router via the Ethernet cable to get things back in order. Despite my best attempts, I was not able to configure this second router to work with the Squeezebox. Two wireless routers, two failed attempts.

Conclusion

The Squeezebox is undoubtedly a very cool and great sounding audio server. It's fun, flexible, and has an endless number of great features. It supports the majority of the popular compression formats out there. If you're a little bit computer savvy, it has endless potential. Unfortunately, though, it isn't without some problems.

I wanted to love this thing, really I did. I wanted it to be my solution. I just couldn't get it to work smoothly in not one but two different wireless networks. I also couldn't get over the difficult web interface. You can integrate with iTunes and other music management software, but that in itself is pretty tricky. Up against a a very slick and easy to use Airport express on one side, and a host of new USB DACs on the other side, the Squeezebox faces some tough competition that makes it a difficult choice for me. I think, however, that the Squeezebox is an improved user interface and a handful of bug fixes away from greatness. For this reason, despite all the troubles I had, I am purchasing the review sample. I hope to post a follow-up review soon.