I Want One of These
I was chatting to a friend of mine after our brass ensemble rehearsal last week and he was telling me about a new device that he’s recently bought for his home sound system. It’s a Slimdevices Squeezebox (no, it’s not one of these).
You plug this into your hi-fi and, assuming wireless here, you install the slimserver software onto the PC containing your music files and the two will communicate across the wireless network, with the PC streaming audio to the squeezebox.
You can test how it would work in your home environment by installing the slimserver software and then use iTunes or some other media player that allows you to open a stream URL. It worked great at home across our wireless network to my laptop with only the occassional blip which I should be able to resolve by procuring a 100Mb switch to connect the PC and wireless access point together, rather than the 10Mb hub I’ve got at present.
The latest incarnation of the Squeezebox incorporates a RSS feed reader so you can have news, weather, scrolling across the display too if you’re into that sort of thing, personally I’d prefer to keep that to the PC or laptop.