Philips MCI-500H review

Other Philips Streamium systems can stream any music stored on the MCI-500 over an ad-hoc wireless network, too. So you could easily stick a Philips WAK3300 in your bedroom and have it pull music from the MCI-500 in your lounge. You can add up to five such 'Stations', all of which can simultaneously stream whatever's playing on the central unit.

Performance
One of the most attractive aspects of this pretty feature-packed system is its ease of use. Menus are simple and well laid out, navigation is straightforward and features work the way you would expect them to work. This is no bad thing, as it's easy to make wireless streaming media systems unattractively complicated to digital virgin.

With the included, and straightforward, Philips Media Manager software installed on your networked PC, it takes only a couple of minutes to have the MCI-500 streaming the MP3, WMA or AAC music files over your home network. Network configuration is taken care of manually and the software automatically sets itself up as a UPnP server.

Short of just playing a CD natively, streaming is the fastest way of playing back music -- CD ripping is, like almost all systems of this ilk, painfully slow. A decent computer will rip a full CD in a couple of minutes. It takes the MCI-500 about 12 minutes of average.

The black gloss finish matches the rest of the Streamium range

Now, with your music ripped or streaming, sound quality is fairly decent. There's a good helping of bass, with a prominent body of mid-range backing it up, but a more extended treble would've been appreciated -- music lacks sparkle in the high-end, leaving some music feeling warm, but slightly blanketed. The Philips MCD908 might be a very different systems, but it costs a couple of hundred quid less and definitely takes the prize in terms of sound quality.

But the speakers are powerful, and will generate a room-filling performance with ease. We just wish Philips had used standard speaker wire terminals so you could upgrade to better speakers in the future -- you'll have to physically cut the bundled cable if you want to upgrade. The colour-coded easy-to-connect terminals add extra convenience to this system, but further limit its appeal to those of us with more critical ears.

The speakers do their job, but we'd immediately want to upgrade

Conclusion
The Philips MCI-500H is an attractive, well-built and painfully easy-to-use system for anyone who wants a living room jukebox, music streamer, Internet radio and CD player in one unit. And being able to stream its collection of CDs to smaller systems in the bedroom or kitchen should win it some extra fans, too.

For a higher CNET UK rating, we would want lossless audio, RSS feed support for listening to podcasts, faster CD ripping and standard speaker terminals, particularly when the more budget-oriented Philips WAC3500D is a few hundred pounds cheaper, includes an iPod dock and offers a similar feature set.

But for £400, it's a fair offering, and you're getting a fat helping of luxury, a much nicer design and better sound quality.

Edited by Marian Smith