Our joint and mutual Christmas present between me and MrsDrG was a Squeezebox. It lets you stream your MP3 collection (and Internet radio) to your hifi. Easy peasy. This isn’t a product review, so I’ll leave you with the nugget version:
“9/10. Superb, although not completely flawless.”
What’s interesting to me is that the device itself has no buttons whatsoever. There’s a remote, which does a good job. But I find myself tapping away at the laptop keyboard and using the Web interface (which runs on whatever machine is doing the music file serving) to navigate and browse my music collection.
My hifi also has a big-screen touch remote control. (I got a bit overexcited selling my bubble Oracle shares in 1999 and and still listening to the results…) — but is only good for controlling Sony kit of that vintage.
It’s been assumed that control of the home hub or set-top box will be the key battleground for the home. But I wonder… Maybe as casual couch web surfing takes off, “remotes” will all come to have web interfaces, and the hundred-button remote control will go away. Maybe Nokia is really the one thinking ahead as to who controls the user experience? Although they seem to have forgotten to include an infra-red interface. Maybe the next version?
PS - If you scan the Internet on port 9000, I bet you’ll find a lot of Squeezebox-powered music collection to listen to…
Posted by Martin Geddes at 08:45 PMTrackBack URL for this entry:
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Heh. I outfitted the house with 5 of these, starting in late 2003. What's neat is you can sync them, and have a "whole house" audio experience, or you can desync them and everyone can listen to what they want. Slim did a very nice piece of engineering here, and the open source dev community has really done a good job with upgrdading the software.
Still, I wonder. I wrote a piece a couple years back about all music should live in the cloud. Do I really want or need to rip my CDs and store them locally, or can't i just count stream my tastes from some application in the cloud ....
Posted by: at January 8, 2007 05:37 PMVery interesting post, a similar experience led to me thinking along similar lines.
My Christmas prezzie to self was a Sonos ZonePlayer. It is similar in many ways to the Squeezebox, although Sonos offers two units: one of which is a source component a la Squeezebox and one of which is an 'integrated' unit including amplification (just add speakers). A system can comprise any combination of the two units and it is this flexibility which suited my particular needs better than the SB approach.
Anyway, one of the interesting facets of the Sonos design, the significance of which doesn't seem to have been picked up in the various reviews I have seen online, is that rather than having a remote duplicating more or less of the controls on the main unit, Sonos have instead moved the _whole_ UI (as near as volume and mute buttons) off the 'box' and onto the remote. The remote connects over the same 'internal' Wi-Fi network as the rest of the system so works anywhere in the house and doesn't require line-of-sight like good old IR. It has a very nice 'iPod-like' UI with a click-wheel and colour display that shows album artwork so browsing one's records begins to feel like flipping through LP sleeves did wayback when. Contrast this with the OEM remote supplied with the Squeezebox and even its megabux sibling the Transporter, something I see has attracted a bit of stick in the online forums.
I am convinced that Sonos’s "it is not a remote control, the control _is_ remote" model is the way of the future for consumer electronics. The advantage is that while providing a great UI where it's needed, it avoids the cost of providing one somewhere it is rarely, if every used, “over there”, “down there” or “in there”. However the disadvantage is that the Sonos controller cannot control any other kit, nor is the Sonos system capable of being controlled by any of the 'one-for-all' style IR-based super-remotes out there. Typical advantage/disadvantage of open versus optimized/proprietary/closed systems I suppose. Despite this, I fully agree with your point that the remote is headed very firmly in the direction of a small tablet PC and that this can offer huge gains in ease and enjoyment of use over the "black box with lots of small buttons" approach.
However, does this point to a web-based interface? I don’t necessarily think so. The huge advantage of the iPod/Sonos UIs is that they are optimized for purpose, both hardware (buttons, knobs) and software-wise. Further, neither has a tendency to crash or bluescreen as my PC did typing this. So it appears to me that the likely winning approach will have both a hardware (think Sonos controller-like, tablet PC-but-waaaaay-simpler) and software components. But will the winning approach be open-systems or proprietary? Hardware-and-software integrated a la iPod or from separate vendors a al PC? Who does both h/w and s/w for consumers really well? Apple? Definitely. Nokia? Probably. Microsoft? Ahem!
An standardized framework for this method of controlling home entertainment components from hi-fi to telly to PC to whatever they merge to become, i.e. a sort of "RC5 for the Wi-Fi generation", would have potentially enormous benefits for the consumer. However, here as elsewhere I would be more inclined to put my money on another mega-tussle between Microsoft and Apple than the industry (or industries) rallying around a credible open systems initiative.
I'd have been more excited if you got this:
http://www.slimdevices.com/pi_transporter.html
Posted by: at January 12, 2007 02:53 PM