Logitech Squeezebox Boom

If you've only got one room in your house, you're probably not going to be that interested in what we're looking at today, because it's a music system that puts your entire music collection in any part of your house that has a connection to your home network. And if you've got WiFi, that means anywhere. I'm Nate Lanxon and we're looking at one of our favourite digital music products of the whole year: the Logitech Squeezebox Boom. Earlier on this year I reviewed the Squeezebox Duet. It hooked up to your existing hi-fi system and connected it to your entire music collection on the PC. We gave it 9.3 out of 10, and the Squeezebox takes all that functionality and adds a pair of excellent stereo speakers into the mix. The Boom looks awesome. Just look at it go. Some glossy black parts are a bit prone to picking up finger grease, but these buttons don't and they're pretty easy to use. And then of course there's this huge knob, responsible for most of the navigation. The WiFi antenna -- well there are two of them actually -- live on the inside. Round the back is an Ethernet port for wired connectivity, and a bizarrely placed headphone socket which really should be around the front. Now a colour screen would have been really great on the Boom, but Logitech has done a sweet job with the dot matrix party going on instead. Here it is, and you can see the menus are easy to navigate. The Boom has no internal storage because it pulls music from your PC, Mac or Linux machine using software called SqueezeCenter. It's a free and open-source download from the manufacturer's Web site, and it's really slick. You can stick your favourite podcast feeds in here too, making them available to listen to on-demand on the Boom. There are a bunch of Internet radio options too, including Last.fm in the UK, and Pandora as well in the States. You can even browse the Internet Archive's collection of live music performances -- all free. One of the other reasons we love El Squeezebox, is its support for like a billion music formats, including MP3, FLAC, WAV, AIFF, WMA, OGG, AAC, Apple Lossless, WMA Lossless, APE, MPC and WavPack. This is insanely impressive. The only music it won't play is protected Windows Media files, like that you've bought from Napster, or protected AAC files, from the iTunes Store. Although, DRM-free files from the iTunes Plus store will work. Just another reason to hate DRM. To top it all off, it sounds great as well. It's no hi-fi but it's not supposed to be. It's supposed to live in your bedroom or kitchen, and for these places it's terrific. It sounds good in a living room as well if you don't have a hi-fi or a larger setup, but bear in mind that it is still a fairly small system. Apart from perhaps a full colour screen and a headphone socket located on the front of the system, there's very little we can complain about. Even the little remote control works well, and it's not insanely priced. It does everything a system like this should do, and it does it exceptionally well. Our final point would simply be, if this is for a main lounge area and you already have a hi-fi, take a look at the Squeezebox Duet for damn-near identical functionality without the speakers. There's a heap of extra info in my full review on CNET now, so don't miss that. I'm Nate Lanxon for CNET UK with the Logitech Squeezebox Boom.