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Santa brought me a rather neat present. It's a Roku Labs Soundbridge, model M1001. It's a music server that allows me to stream digital music from the hard drive of my PC to my main sound system. It also lets me stream Internet radio stations too. For what it's worth, I'd never heard of this company or its products before receiving this present.
Opening the packaging and looking at the unit, I was a bit skeptical as to its capabilities as it is only a 2.5" diameter cylinder that's about 11" long. It's a matt silver color with black end caps and sits on a heavy non-skid rubber base piece. It has a bit-mapped LCD display across the front and a remote that is "minimalist" in layout (more on that later). The only input connection is a Cat5-type port. The other choice is wireless and the unit comes already set-up for that. There are three output choices consisting of L/R RCA, Toslink and digital coax. Oh, I've included an image of the Soundbridge at the bottom of this post.
My home PC rig is wireless via a LinkSys WRT54GS router. I have a 300GByte external drive mapped through the router as drive M. This drive contains all of my 638 CDs which I had ripped to WMA lossless files via Windows Media Player 10. I’m currently using Media Player 11 for playing/playlisting.
Set-up was simplicity itself for the most part. I verified that everything was running properly on the PC-side of things then got down to business. I place the Soundbridge on its heavy rubber stand on top of my Dish DVR/decoder and within cable-reach of my Musical Fidelity A324 DAC. I used the digital coax output on the Soundbridge and ran it into the DAC using one of (warning: shameless plug) Lex’s 1m CATCable digital coax cables. I plugged the wall-wart power supply into my surge protector/conditioner and then into the Soundbridge and waited on the unit to boot. As it booted, it found the wireless signal and as I’m using WEP encryption it prompted me for the key. The unit stores the key which eliminates you having to re-key it if you lose power for some reason or other. After inputting the key it continued on its merry way for another minute and then found all the albums, artists and playlists I had resident on my internal hard drive. It turns out that you have to open up the permissions on a mapped drive to allow it to share its content with the Soundbridge. Once I’d done that I had to re-boot the Soundbridge to get it to see the mapped drive. After re-booting everything showed up and away I went. I haven’t had time to do any serious A/B comparisons between the lossless files and the CDs themselves, but I can say that in casual listening the sound quality sounds VERY good. I’ll post more on this after I get a chance to do some extended “quality” listening.
For owner/user support there is a technical support group and also a forum you can access on the Roku Labs website which turned out to be a good resource when I needed a fast answer on the mapped drive problem.
I only have one real gripe about this component and that is the remote. It’s an extremely basic item that doesn’t even have a keypad on it. For example: to enter in the network encryption key, or any other data not on a pick list, you have to scroll through a list of numbers/letters shown on the face of the Soundbridge itself, choosing each one individually with the Select key on the remote! Talk about a pain. But that’s it. That’s the only negative I’ve come up with to date.
Possibly the best part of this is the price. I’d been looking at Olive’s line of servers at $1,000 and up. I’d been looking at Sonos’ line at $700 and up. So, I figured that most everything was going for something close to that, but no (yes, yes, I know, mine was a present). To purchase this system for yourself, the retail price is $199! So, if you are looking for a cost-effective way of getting your digital music library into play (pun intended) on your sound system, then be sure to check this little gem out. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.
Again, I’ll get back with more info later on how the digital files sound in comparison to their direct CD parents.
Opening the packaging and looking at the unit, I was a bit skeptical as to its capabilities as it is only a 2.5" diameter cylinder that's about 11" long. It's a matt silver color with black end caps and sits on a heavy non-skid rubber base piece. It has a bit-mapped LCD display across the front and a remote that is "minimalist" in layout (more on that later). The only input connection is a Cat5-type port. The other choice is wireless and the unit comes already set-up for that. There are three output choices consisting of L/R RCA, Toslink and digital coax. Oh, I've included an image of the Soundbridge at the bottom of this post.
My home PC rig is wireless via a LinkSys WRT54GS router. I have a 300GByte external drive mapped through the router as drive M. This drive contains all of my 638 CDs which I had ripped to WMA lossless files via Windows Media Player 10. I’m currently using Media Player 11 for playing/playlisting.
Set-up was simplicity itself for the most part. I verified that everything was running properly on the PC-side of things then got down to business. I place the Soundbridge on its heavy rubber stand on top of my Dish DVR/decoder and within cable-reach of my Musical Fidelity A324 DAC. I used the digital coax output on the Soundbridge and ran it into the DAC using one of (warning: shameless plug) Lex’s 1m CATCable digital coax cables. I plugged the wall-wart power supply into my surge protector/conditioner and then into the Soundbridge and waited on the unit to boot. As it booted, it found the wireless signal and as I’m using WEP encryption it prompted me for the key. The unit stores the key which eliminates you having to re-key it if you lose power for some reason or other. After inputting the key it continued on its merry way for another minute and then found all the albums, artists and playlists I had resident on my internal hard drive. It turns out that you have to open up the permissions on a mapped drive to allow it to share its content with the Soundbridge. Once I’d done that I had to re-boot the Soundbridge to get it to see the mapped drive. After re-booting everything showed up and away I went. I haven’t had time to do any serious A/B comparisons between the lossless files and the CDs themselves, but I can say that in casual listening the sound quality sounds VERY good. I’ll post more on this after I get a chance to do some extended “quality” listening.
For owner/user support there is a technical support group and also a forum you can access on the Roku Labs website which turned out to be a good resource when I needed a fast answer on the mapped drive problem.
I only have one real gripe about this component and that is the remote. It’s an extremely basic item that doesn’t even have a keypad on it. For example: to enter in the network encryption key, or any other data not on a pick list, you have to scroll through a list of numbers/letters shown on the face of the Soundbridge itself, choosing each one individually with the Select key on the remote! Talk about a pain. But that’s it. That’s the only negative I’ve come up with to date.
Possibly the best part of this is the price. I’d been looking at Olive’s line of servers at $1,000 and up. I’d been looking at Sonos’ line at $700 and up. So, I figured that most everything was going for something close to that, but no (yes, yes, I know, mine was a present). To purchase this system for yourself, the retail price is $199! So, if you are looking for a cost-effective way of getting your digital music library into play (pun intended) on your sound system, then be sure to check this little gem out. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.
Again, I’ll get back with more info later on how the digital files sound in comparison to their direct CD parents.
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