If the idea of having your entire CD collection stored inside a hi-fi, being able to beam it all over your house and being able to stream music from your PC wirelessly sounds appealing, you're looking at the right music system.
The Philips MCI-500H is the latest and greatest Streamium system from Philips, aimed at being the central musical hub of your living room. It's on sale now for around £400.
Design
Depending on how much your eyes are deceiving you, you may be fooled into thinking this comprises two separate hi-fi units. The two pseudo-separates are in fact one unit -- a block of navigation and control buttons, and a block housing a gorgeous colour LCD screen. Between them is a tray-loading CD drive.
The main unit is more lightweight than we expected, but is well-built nonetheless. Philips' obsession with gloss hasn't gone amiss either, which is something you'll either love, hate or indeed not care either way about, which is where our opinions fall.
A pair of pretty solid 50W two-way speakers are included, featuring 133mm (5.25-inch) woofers and 25mm (1-inch) silk dome tweeters.
Features
Up from the 80GB hard disk we usually see in systems like this, Philips has stuck a 160GB model in the MCI-500 for ripping your CDs to. And you can rip them at MP3 bit rates between 128Kbps and 320Kbps. Ripping to lossless FLAC or WAV would've been a nice touch, but Philips never has been fond of supporting lossless audio.
This remains true with the formats it'll play over your home network from your PC, or from USB memory sticks via the integrated USB socket -- MP3, WMA and AAC files are fine, but FLAC, OGG, Lossless WMA and WAV are ushered away. Clearly the audiophile isn't the target market here -- it's all about convenience.
In keeping with this, CDs can be ripped to the hard disk with a couple of clicks of the 'record' button, and if the system is connected to the Internet via Ethernet or Wi-Fi (both are supported, included encrypted networks), the system will access the Gracenote CD database, adding artist, album and track information into the files it rips. That said, a less extensive version of the Gracenote database lives on the internal hard disk, so popular CDs will be tagged without any Internet connectivity.
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User reviews1
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pren 6 December 2008
Good: Many features
Bad: Some basic features not working
Comment: I bought it octobe 31 2008 and have been using it for over a mounth. The advanced features are working which is good but some of the more basic functions are not which is annoying and seems strange for a company like Philips. I have listed them below. They are reported to Philips and they have answered that they are aware of the problems and working on it. Maybe they will update the firmware sometime in the future. I have version 1.04.3131.
- The display settings is not saved when turning the device off, when you turn it on again the display setting is set to default, so you have to change it every time if you don't like the default setting.
- The FM radio RDS is not activated when you turn on the device, you have to activate it using the remote, it also gets activated if you change anything from the settings menue (strange).
- The auto time sync function is not working, when you turn off the device it say "no station registerd" even if there is a radio station registered. May have something to do with the RDS not is activated automatically.
- When you play tracks from the harddisk and turn on the shuffle function it sometimes comes back to the same track after about 10 tracks even if there are many more tracks to select from, you end up repeating these 10 tracks.
- The philips web-page for selecting favorite internet radio stations are not allowing you to connect to the RadioIO site. Even though they have prepared activation for this. I have a valid sounpass acount that can be used from the RadioIO web but it is not possible to be used with this device.
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