Some questions about my new toy: Philips SLA 5520 wireless music receiver

For some time, I have wanted to store all of my CDs (several hundred)
on a PC and then easily access them around the house. I tried some
research but it was hard to get solid information about the pros and
cons of various possible solutions. Also, the effectiveness of the
wireless ones could probably not determined except by trying it.

Eventually I decided to risk the cost of a little wireless music
receiver and bought a Philips SLA 5520. For a server, I am using
existing equipment: PC 1.8GHz, 512Mb RAM, 80Gb HDD with Windows 2000
and a Netgear DG834G wireless router. I am converting the CDs to MP3s
with iTunes and using the highest quality I can find: 320kbps with no
VBR. I can afford the disk and I want as close as possible to original
CD quality. The receiver is attached to a NAD 701 receiver and a pair
of Tanoy R3s.

I must say that I am pretty impressed. I have not done any very
careful quality comparisons but it is certainly OK for at least casual
listening. I plan to do some blind tests with fussy friends. The
convenience is just what I wanted. I am mostly into classical music.
I have been manually tidying up the folders as I import the CDs and
now, from the device I can go in by composer and type of work: e.g
Beethoven, Piano Sonatas, C#m Op 27.2. I have not done it yet but I
plan to use play lists to set up a whole evening's listening.

Now here are the questions:

1. I am already tempted to buy a second receiver for the bedroom. Can
I run two receivers from the same server? Do I need two instances of
the server program running or is one enough? The PC would seem to have
the power to handle two receivers, it does not seem to be stressed by
the one receiver. Even if I am importing a CD with iTunes (which is
CPU hungry), the server does not struggle and the music sounds OK. I
cannot easily determine if the network will cope but 320kbps is way
below its clamed abilities.

2. If the above works, can I listen to different stuff on the two
receivers at the same time? Can I listen to the same stuff? In the
second case, I don't mean simply selecting the same thing from both
devices at about the same time. I want to receive the same stream on
both synchronised. I guess that the answer is going to be no since
there is no obvious way on the client to ask for this. I have vaguely
considered setting up my our internet radio station (limited to my LAN)
to achieve this but it is not obvious if it is worth the effort. I
have e-mailed Philips support about this but I don't have an answer
yet.

3. One small annoyance is that it will not play two consecutive MP3s
without a slight pause. With some classical music, there is no gap
between movements, CD players cope with this and the track changes with
no pause but the receiver goes silent for a couple of seconds. Maybe,
I need to find how to stitch two (or more) MP3s together or import two
(or more) tracks into a single MP3.

4. Now the opposite question. If I build my play list of say a
concerto followed by a symphony, I want brief or no pauses between the
movements of each work but a pause between the two works. I had hoped
that the server software would have a pause between items option but I
can't find one. An idea just occurred to me, could I get silent MP3.
A few such files with various lengths e.g. 5s, 10s, 15s would do the
job. I could "play" them between pieces.

5. Now a more PC techy question. You need to log onto the PC to start
the server program. We have multiple logons for different family
members. The receiver thinks that there are multiple servers (one for
each logon) but only one is active at a time. If the PC user logs off
then the server stops. It would be nice to run the server as a Windows
service so it ran independently of log ons. (I already run Apache that
way)

--
Seán O'Leathlóbhair

.

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