Philips Streamium WACS7000 review

Philips Streamium WACS7000 Review

Reviewed by: Nate Lanxon

Reviewed on: 17 July 2007

The 'Music Follows Me' feature is pretty snazzy. If you're moving from the room with the music Centre to one with a Station, hitting the 'Music Follows Me' button allows the music to be paused, and then continued on the Station in the other room. A well-designed, two-way remote control features an LCD screen that mimics the ones on the two systems perfectly. The system it controls can be altered manually on the remote itself.

The rear of the music Centre boasts lots of useful connectivity options

A 'Music Broadcast' mode fires whatever's playing from the music Centre's hard disk to all Stations in range. The problem is that if a Station is told to stop playing, it can only be reactivated by starting a broadcast again from the Centre.

Performance
Setup of both units was a breeze. They automatically install themselves and can be configured in a couple of button pushes. The PC media management software included is nicely designed and takes seconds to configure after an easy installation. The library then allows the music Centre or Station to access media over a wired or wireless network. Technophobes shouldn't have too many headaches getting these systems up and running in 15 minutes.

Ripping CDs to the Centre's internal 80GB hard disk takes too long. It took the best part of 15 minutes to rip each CD into 320kbps MP3 -- the highest bit rate available. Music can also be ripped in real-time from any audio source jacked into the auxiliary socket. There's support for uncompressed audio, too.

Menus are painfully slow at times, and neither of our USB thumb drives would work with either the Station or the Centre. In fact, the Centre crashed and rebooted when we inserted the drive!

Sound quality on the music Centre will please most people. Although separation between instruments isn't as good as many systems, the bass is powerful and high frequencies accurate. Some heavy drum and bass from club-favourites Pendulum was powerfully delivered and shook the floor at higher volumes. Conversely, some softer rock from Dire Straits was fairly accurate and warm. On the whole, performance is very good.

The bass reflex ports on the music Centre are built into the side panels

The music Station -- the smaller of the two systems -- performed less well. Bass was in short supply, but general pop sounded fine. It'll suit a teenager's crypt of a bedroom quite happily.

The Wi-Fi signal between both units withstood separation across the length of our offices, although an older building with thicker walls may not be as impressive.

Conclusion
The WACS7000 consists of a functional pair of systems, but there are too many oversights and small features left out for us to say we're completely convinced. Although setup is a breeze, the system can be slow at times, the Centre can't broadcast anything but music stored on its internal hard disk and the CD ripping speed will have you waste enough time to write a short novel.

If you're only after a jukebox and audio streamer, Sony's Giga Juke NAS-50HDE might be a better bet.

Edited by Jason Jenkins
Additional editing by Kate Macefield