Echoes of the underwater world

Thanks to Zaheer who pointed me to the SlimDevices website i discovered the SqueezeBox music player. I ordered 2 of them together with a friend on wednesday evening and was very pleased to receive it on friday morning.

This device is just purely awesome, the fluorescent LCD screen looks very nice and the menu animations are just perfect for that kind of device. The server controlling device(s) is written in Perl and is free software which is a key point for my home network. I imported my whole music collection in the server and i m now able to listen to thousands of songs plus all internet radios directly from my living room because the devices uses a 54Mbps wireless connection (supports WEP, WPA, etc..)

It supports WMA, Vorbis, MP3, WAV, FLAC and much more… Moreover you can completely control one or several devices remotely from the web interface. You can listen to different audio on each device or get them to synchronize with each other for : power, volume, and playback. Menus are exported from the server so you can add your own features very easily, translate the menus, add radio feeds, etc…

One of the good thing for the audiophiles around there is that it supports digital audio output with either coax or optical cable. Having your music collection as FLAC and doing playback on a good amplifier through the optical cable gives awesome sound playback.

So yesterday afternoon we ended up going shopping for a good amplifier for our living room. It’s pretty painfull because it’s hard to find anything else than home theater systems these days. Buying seperate pieces ends up costing more money for same quality products. I finally decided to buy a Sony home theater system with nice/good speakers and optical sound input instead of the Bose 321 GS II that i was originally planning (too expensive !)

That’s it, everything is connected, the amplifier has a total power of 1000 W and the Sony speakers are cute. The SqueezeBox device is a very nice object to have in a living room and my wife is already familiar with the interface and listening to music all day long. I can’t wait for the fire place to be ready to use so that i can start reading good books listening to good music next to a warm fire.