Philips Streamium NP2900

Logitech's Squeezebox Boom has been a firm favourite here at Vulture Central and, for the best part of a year, it has had the market to itself. Now Philips is looking to crash the party with the new Streamium NP2900, another device designed to play music stored on your computer over an 802.11b/g wireless network, without the …

[Mark]

Fix for incorrect ordering of tracks.

http://www.twonkymedia.com/installs.html# Pick up the Server updates there, (5.0.61 currently).

There is also a newer build here, which has a a few more issues fixed:

http://www.twonkyforum.com/unsupported/5.0.65/

Anyone know if the Streamium NP2900 supports pushing media to it? It's a shame the review does not mention this.

[Anonymous Coward]

Does the Phillips remote kill your computer

I like my Squeezebox Boom a lot, but I placed the remote on the top of my new MacBook Pro and it destroyed the hard drive. While the MacBook was being repaired I fell back to my old Dell, and did the same thing. Only then did I read the users guide and find there is a tiny but powerful magnet in the remote for sticking the remote to refrigerators. It was powerful enough to ruin two hard drives when placed on the open front of . Does the Phillips have a magnet too?

[Jerome]

It's a start

I can't imagine that little thing "filling a room with sound". Why don't they sell a cheaper version without the toy speakers? Also, unless the "L/R stereo analogue phono input sockets" which the review mentions are actually output sockets, I can't see how the device "covers most users' connectivity needs".

It's nice to see more devices like this starting to appear though. There's been a woeful lack of choice in this area, which is odd since I'd imagine a huge number of music fans would jump at a device like this, if they only knew they needed it.

[Dave]

@Neil

Neil, static magnets don't affect hard drives. They don't affect floppy disks either. There was some research done a while ago where magnets were left on disks for days and had no effect whatsoever. You have to move the magnetic feild to change the disk, that's how the drive writes to it, and is basic physics.

Unfortunately due to the popularity of the myth I've been unable to find the research on Google, which is just full of people stating blindly that because disk is magnetic, magnet breaks disk.

Sorry for the lack of proof, I thought it was a reg story from the early naughties but couldn't find it here either.

Dave

[Groz Bat]

No future in this solution

This is a niche product with a declining future.

The coming trend will be for people to store all their music on their mobile phone and connect speakers wirelessly to the phone if they need to.

Current mobile memory cards can store 16GB, and 32GB is not far off.

[Dave]

@ (The other) Dave @Neil

The reason you can't find that research is probably because it is bunk.

The basic operation of a hard drive means that the disc spins, so your argument about static fields does not hold up, and basic physics says that a magnetic field in proximity to the right materials _temporarily_ changes their alignment, and _permanently_ changes it in other cases.

[Peter Hartley]

Gapless?

"We think Philips missed a trick by not enabling the NP2900 to access iTunes – or Squeezecentre - as a server in the way Roku's Soundbridge can. Doing so would not only have meant gapless playback for opera fans..."

Um, what's the connection there? Surely gapless playback is a client-side feature, not a server-side feature; if NP2900 can't do it against Twonky or other UPnP servers, what makes you think it could manage it against an Itunes or Squeezebox protocol server?

Peter