Philips WACS700/05 Streamium Wireless Music Centre

First the good things. It looks fantastic. It was incredibly easy to set up – you literally tuned the centre and 2 stations on, they booted up, took about a minute to find each other wirelessly and that was it, ready to go. “Ripping” CDs is also very straightforward, it takes about 10 minutes per CD, but you do have to make sure you don’t turn the power off for at least an hour afterwards whilst it saves the conversion to an mp3. I have the centre in the living room, one station in the kitchen and one upstairs in the main bedroom. Our house is relatively new, (and hence has thin walls!) so there is no interference and the stations sound as good as the centre. (You do need to keep the centre away from a plasma TV) Even turned up loud, there is very little distortion. Of course the sound will not be as good as a wired separates system but that’s not the point.

The music broadcast function, which allows you to play the same music on all 3 and is one of the reasons I bought the system, is a work of genius. Of course as each unit is stand alone you can play different music on each one at the same time, again with no interference.

Connecting to the PC was also very easy using an ethernet cable and the provided software called Digital Media Management (be aware this only works on PCs, not Macs). I have most of my music (about 4,000 songs) on itunes on a Windows XP PC. Although itunes music is in AAC format and the WACS700 only imports mp3, it is very easy to convert songs from AAC to mp3 via itunes. I have heard that this reduces the quality but I genuinely didn’t notice the difference. It took about 8 hours to transfer all 4,000 songs to the hard drive of the WACS700 (I have 40% space left). The software did drop the connection a few times, but in theory I will only be doing this once!

There is an excellent 2 way remote control, which has the same display as the centre and stations, i.e. all the track names, artist playing time etc.

And now the bad things. The radio is FM only and not DAB, although the reception is pretty good. The LCD screen is a bit grey and clunky (like the very first ipod) and I have been spoilt by the use of a click wheel on an ipod – here you have to keep pressing the down button. The system comes pre-programmed with Gracenote for the track and artist names, however it is not that good – it often can’t find the information for even brand new CDs. The way round is to either download from the computer (as itunes has not yet let me down on finding the track information where Gracenote has failed) or to rip the CD and then change the track names via the Digital Media Management software.

All in all I think it is an excellent system for what it is. It is not for audiophile purists but it is for those who want to listen to all of their music all over the house without the mess of cables and extra speakers. The sensible part of me may have waited another year for the technology to improve, but the rest of me is so glad I didn’t!

Some CD rips have also give poor MP3’s which is disappointing and the navigation around the interface is very sluggish, id expect it to be instant.

The manual / instruction is woefully inadequate and poorly written.

The sound re-production is lacking some mid range response and if you don’t spend time adjusting the unit it can sound a little too heavy on the bass, there are bass and treble controls, but these aren’t exactly well signposted by the interface.

The music follow me is a fantastic idea, but it would be nice to hear the music continuing on one unit until the other has picked up the song.

Hopefully some of these gripes will be ironed out with firmware updates and listening to customer feedback, but I suspect that you will not be able to get anything done about the centre noise until the next version.

All in All its very nice idea and works well and as I said the above are only minor gripes which are fixable by Philips, but for the price id rather have seen them fix these kind of things with some well placed beta testing.