Streaming players or "clock radios" - suggestions?

[muzzer]

Do you need to run the Air from your phone? Feasible but am wary of relying on it too much tbh. Looks great tho.

I realise I am a Luddite cleaving to my cds and I almost always use the Roberts for radio, increasingly internet radio, and it too weighs a few bricks.

Decisions decisions

[Globaltruth]

Do you need to run the Air from your phone? Feasible but am wary of relying on it too much tbh. Looks great tho.

I realise I am a Luddite cleaving to my cds and I almost always use the Roberts for radio, increasingly internet radio, and it too weighs a few bricks.

Decisions decisions

Good Q - yes the Air can run on its own as an internet radio, it has 10 programmable buttons which can be associated to internet radio stations. I can also stream to it from any Apple device using Airplay, or, on the Macbook, a fab little piece of software called Airfoil (from Rogue Amoeba - they also do a software package which lets you set up your own radio station for 60 dollars...). Airfoil recognises all Airplay enabled devices and lets you stream anything to them, i.e. anything from a browser, Spotify, last.fm, iPlayer... It does a great job of sync'ing too.
I also meant to say that the sound quality on the Minx Air is very decent for a single box containing 2 speakers.
Time to rethink some of the old certainties about what makes a great sound system perhaps.
The Air also supports Bluetooth.
My proudly Luddite wife is a fan of the Air - quite rightly she demands simplicity - with the press of a single button she can be listening to the radio.
Boot up time on the Air is good too.

Yes, I also use some ancient FM radios (including a wind up one on the allotment during shed based time, although I can actually get wifi in my shed ).

[richardfinegold]

I use a Squeezebox Touch. Works great but it has been discontinued.

[richardfinegold]

Yes, I'm in the market for something similar. I have a Cambridge product - the Minx Air 100

http://www.cambridgeaudio.com/products/wireless-speakers/air-100

which i think does everything you require, except record. It's v. good, has a fairly small remote control but there are some buttons on the machine itself. It is the size and weight of about 3 house bricks though, so you'd need a sturdy and capacious bedside cabinet. I also have a cheaper Azatom Stealth (NB i have nothing to do with product naming, this is surely one of the worst ever?)

http://www.amazon.co.uk/AZATOM%C2%AE-Stealth-Air-Speaker-Airplay-Bluetooth%C2%AE/dp/B00B9GJ0QE

It's at the cheap and cheerful end of the market, bit tinny, needs constant tweaking of the bass end to get any sort of sensible sound. It's this I'm looking to replace...

Bose have a new range of products in this area - I had a slightly jaundiced view of Bose until I read this article explaining that all profits are ploughed back into R&D, not always audio R&D, not always successful - so a lot of which is written off...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/technology-topics/11138572/Bose-at-50-beyond-sound.html

http://www.bose.co.uk/GB/en/home-and-personal-audio/wi-fi-music-systems/soundtouch-wi-fi-music-systems/?gclid=CNyojpjWn8ECFSoOwwod8YQA4A

Be interested to know if anyone has taken the plunge..

If you can live without bass and treble, then buy Bose.

No highs, no lows, must be Bose.

[muzzer]

I see the Air has an ethernet connection and so presumably can play anything stored elsewhere......I do like the look of it. My real problem with the Roberts is the sense that it just doesn't work properly and is poorly designed, however great the brand and the sound.

On a related issue, I have a lot of music stored on external drives - like many of us these days - and am frustrated at the folder structure used, for example, on the WD Mybook, which is not the same as itunes and makes it hard to find stuff. Suboptimal.

But I cba to spend too much precious time on this. Hey ho.

[johnb]

I use a Squeezebox Touch. Works great but it has been discontinued.

The Squeezebox system would have been the obvious choice (at least for me as a confirmed Squeezebox Touch user) but, as you say, it is sadly discontinued.

Still, I have a backup Touch stored away and there is ongoing development of the Logitech Media Server thanks to Michael Hergher and the Squeezebox community.

[Globaltruth]

The Squeezebox system would have been the obvious choice (at least for me as a confirmed Squeezebox Touch user) but, as you say, it is sadly discontinued.

Still, I have a backup Touch stored away and there is ongoing development of the Logitech Media Server thanks to Michael Hergher and the Squeezebox community.

the kit I use now is replacement for my Squeezebox kit, which I sold on Ebay and got almost what I paid for them, presumably to people like you!
Thank you!

I'm actually finding it quite liberating now I don't have to rely on the mercies of individual developers (although I know I'm still at the mercy of anonymous developers somewhere else...) more importantly I think the client/server model used by the Squeezebox development team was inappropriate for easy music streaming (yes, good quality, good reliability but awful UI, to do anything other than the basics you have to keep a server running on a machine - why?), the Squeezebox solution was simply way too complex with an infinite variety of possibilities, most of which I didn't use (a common weakness with tech).

[johnb]

GG,

Don't thank me - I bought a backup Touch shortly after the Squeezebox range was discontinued but while the retail outlets still had ample stocks.

As for the Squeezebox system, it's horses for courses. For some people the Squeezebox system was/is not appropriate and it is true that (a) to get the best out of the system one needs the server running on a box somewhere (I use a HP Microserver) and (b) the extendibility and flexibility of the system was/is both a boon (with plugins for Spotify, iPlayer, Qobuz, etc, etc) and a curse because it was too easy for people who didn't know what they were doing to fiddle and get into difficulties. The system also very much depends on the systematic tagging of music files (though there is a folder browse).

I use iPeng on an iPad as the interface and think it is pretty good.

As far as I am aware there is still nothing else available that matches the Squeezebox Touch's combination of flexibility, audio quality (digital out) and price.

(Apologies for going off topic.)

[Risorgimento]

Hmm. Please don't diss CDs. They are less faffy than iPods etc.

I agree. Having got carried away recording a lot of stuff I suddenly discovered that I had 300GB of music...largely unindexed. As I needed to upgrade my Mac operating system, I needed to make some free space and so I offloaded the 300GB to a separate disk. I have not accessed it since!

CD's work fine, just dandy, IMO.

[Risorgimento]

Not sure the equivalent exists for the Apple products at home...

... the SD card route isn't HiFi but it's so easy - plus my car actually has 2 SD slots in the Media system so I use one with a few good Through The Night programmes (occasionally refreshed when I spot another good one) recorded on to it, so it provides simple, instant on-the-move listening with no need to update the iPod, and radio listening with no danger of Tom Service or Sean Fafferty popping up and ruining the day or my driving style!!

I use Audio Hijack Pro on my iMac. There are other programs available.

[Globaltruth]

GG,

Don't thank me - I bought a backup Touch shortly after the Squeezebox range was discontinued but while the retail outlets still had ample stocks.

As for the Squeezebox system, it's horses for courses. For some people the Squeezebox system was/is not appropriate and it is true that (a) to get the best out of the system one needs the server running on a box somewhere (I use a HP Microserver) and (b) the extendibility and flexibility of the system was/is both a boon (with plugins for Spotify, iPlayer, Qobuz, etc, etc) and a curse because it was too easy for people who didn't know what they were doing to fiddle and get into difficulties. The system also very much depends on the systematic tagging of music files (though there is a folder browse).

I use iPeng on an iPad as the interface and think it is pretty good.

As far as I am aware there is still nothing else available that matches the Squeezebox Touch's combination of flexibility, audio quality (digital out) and price.

(Apologies for going off topic.)

think we're allowed...I also used iPeng, which is/was a brilliant piece of software, but in my new simple world I don't need any intermediation software.
I never particularly got into difficulties rather there seemed to be a constant internal battle to keep all the different plugins/add-ons in sync which meant that sometimes you could boot up, and...nothing....worked. V Frustrating!
Now I don't feel so tied in (not even to Airplay) - but what is most frustrating of all is that when Squeezebox was acquired by Logitech if they had made the correct technical design decisions they could be a major player - offering high quality audio with great flexibility at a great price. But Logitech bottled it.

Sonos have recently slashed their prices and fundamentally changed their architecture - clearly after a bigger market share. Still seems a v closed system to me, although I'm not sure that matters (however I did put nearly all my music onto Sony minidisks at one point, so what do I know?)

(ok you're right it is off topic, so apologies from me also)

[Risorgimento]

How good is the Sonos in terms of navigating your way around classical music? I know that iTunes is pop-oriented but iPeng gives one a much better interface to any music stored in iTunes. The Branner (did I spell that right?) is appalling for classical music. Trying to find something is impossible especially if you have multiple performances of the same work.

[muzzer]

I've just come across a newer Roberts - no CD but everything else I'm after - http://www.whathifi.com/roberts/stream-93i/review - anyone familiar with it?

[Nick Armstrong]

I've just come across a newer Roberts - no CD but everything else I'm after - http://www.whathifi.com/roberts/stream-93i/review - anyone familiar with it?

Looks good - but it doesn't seem to enable recording off the radio... http://www.robertsradio.co.uk/produc.../STREAM93i.htm

That's the thing I'm always after.

[muzzer]

Good spot - and as I see from reviews on a***on it has the same unergonomic interface and inextinguishable backlight that annoyed me with the 63i......The (leisurely) search continues.