Sunday, March 18, 2007
WiFi Radio - Streamed Audio in the Kitchen
I've had this for a few weeks now - it's an Acoustic Energy "WiFi Radio":
Acoustic Energy are an outfit that I previously knew of for making large reasonably expensive loudspeakers. Apparently they also now see a future in small internet gadgets.
The software and computer hardware inside is supplied by a company called Reciva, who promote similar gadgets from other manufacturers on their web site. The case styling (and presumably the speakers) of this one are provided by Acoustic Energy, and they've squeezed a pair of little speakers in to the box. I think it looks quite smart - sort of like a little jukebox.
You can get all the technical specs and claimed feature list from the links above, here I'll just stick to what doesn't work ...
In brief the product aims to do two related things: Play live and recorded Real and WMA audio streams from the internet; and play MP3 and WMA files from a local network.
Audio Streaming
This really works quite well. The single rotary control lets you scroll quickly through a hierarchy of locations or genres to find stations. I have been listening to the 7-day archive of content made available by the BBC in the On-Demand mode. I can choose the programme I want to hear, the starting point in that program, and press play. There are options to pause, forward or rewind the streams during playback. Perfect.
For live radio, I stick to the Tivoli Model 1 that I also have in the kitchen. It is slightly cheaper than the AE WiFi radio, but is considerably nicer to listen to, and doesn't use up my meagre internet download allowance!
I'm not sure if there should be any advantage to choosing WMA over Real, but for the BBC streams that I've listened to the WMA bit rate is much lower than the Real stream, and the playback volume is also lower. Apart from a few experiments, I've stuck with the Real streams. The bit rate is typically 44kbps but drops in steps down to 11kbps, presumably when there is network congestion somewhere between the radio set and the BBC servers.
It is a testement to the relatively poor quality of the sound from this device that I hardly notice the drops in bit rate.
File Playback
In contrast to the "radio" function, playback of files from a computer on my local network is frustratingly broken. There are supposed to be two ways to play back files, either directly from CIFS/SMB (Windows) shares, or via a UPnP server.
I tried the network shares option first, but the AE WiFi Radio kept prompting me for a password to both the Windows XP and Windows Vista shares that I tried to connect to. I am not aware of any password being set for these, and I made sure that the Everybody user had full access to them. No joy.
Using the alternative option of UPnP to get to the music was more successful. Windows Media Player 11 configures access to files in this way, and the WiFi radio was able to see the shared files. In this case the music files could be browsed either by folder structure or genre, but adding a whole album of music is either a tedious process of adding files one by one, or accepting playback in alphabetical order.
Not that it really matters, because my device rarely manages to make it all the way through a song anyway. I've upgraded the WiFi Radio firmware (which took about an hour, compared to the advertised 15 minutes), and my wireless router firmware twice. No improvement.
Misc Problems
The sound quaility is not good, and I'm surprised AE are happy to put their logo on it. Why bother having two tiny stereo speakers so close together? The Tivoli Model One sounds much better with its single (larger) driver, and the unit is about the same size.
Another problem is that "wifi noise" breaks through in to the speaker output whenever data is required over the network (for instance at the beginning of a music file). Even if the speaker is "muted" because headphones/line-out socket is being used!
I suspect that my problems playing files from my local network are caused by brief disconnections from the WiFi network. I would love to be able to plug this in using an ethernet cable to confirm this, but there is no ethernet socket.
But it's convenient ...
I guess I sound pretty disappointed. Well I am, but it is very convenient, so it keeps it's place in the kitchen.
Labels: AE, Music, WiFi Radio
: 7:32 PM A firmware update for the Radio (the April 2007 release) has let me browse network shares, however that is slow because the little radio has to scan and index all of the files in the network share, and in my case there are many files.
For that reason I am sticking to using a UPnP server to present the index of files to the radio. Windows Media Player v11 can be used for that. I've also used Simple Center which is free to use (not just for Windows), and that has the advantage of not automatically importing all all of my existing play lists. That means that I can define a small number of play lists in Simple Center specially for the AE/Reciva radio and choose them quickly from the "Playlists" section in the UPnP menu on the radio.
Currently though I'm using Twonky installed on my DNS323 NAS/File Server as a UPnP server, and it seems to work well not just with the Reciva radio but also with my Kiss 1600 player.
I've heard that there is a new firmware for the AE radio that will be released soon, so that may improve things. If it's not too late for you to return your AE radio, the Roberts WM201 is a lot better as long as you don't need to use the headphone socket!
: 2:35 PM : 8:21 PM Home
