At this price level, high-quality sound isn't a perk, it's a requirement. With living sound on, we played through loads of tracks, spanning a number of genres. We kicked off with Deerhunter's melancholy Microcastle and the lush mix was a good match with the NP2900's room-filling living sound effect. The sound was detailed and warm -- exactly the opposite of what we usually find with Wi-Fi radios.
We wanted to see just how hard we could push the little unit, so next up was Black Sabbath. We expected the NP2900 to fold under the hard rock sound of Jack the Ripper, but it held its own, and Geezer Butler's bass sounded nimble and tight. We switched gears and put on jazz guitarist Pat Martino's Live at Yoshi's and the NP2900 didn't skip a beat, with Pat's guitar clearly in the centre of the mix and Billy Hart's hi-hat firing out of the back speaker. The NP2900 gets surprisingly loud, and, if you push it too hard, the sound will distort, but our medium-size living room was comfortably rocking with the volume at halfway.
Next, we put the NP2900 right up against its main competitor, the Boom. We played a similar selection of tunes, but, even with the units right next to each other, it was difficult to pick a favourite. The NP2900's living sound feature is impressive directly compared with the Boom, as the NP2900 did a much better job at creating a wide soundstage. On the other hand, we thought the Boom was more faithful to the original recordings and was able to rock out slightly more, even if it did sound less immersive. If we were forced to make a choice, we'd go with the Boom, but both radios offer very good sound quality for the size and you're best off auditioning them yourself to see which sound suits you better.
Apart from sound quality, we did run into a couple snags that dampened our experience somewhat. The NP2900 isn't nearly as good as the Boom at playing back albums seamlessly (that is, without gaps between tracks) from your PC. That might not matter to most listeners, but, if you're listening to Abbey Road and there's a three-second gap between Sun King, Mean Mr Mustard and Polythene Pam, it can really take you out of the moment.
Our other issue was that we had some difficulty getting the included TwonkyVision software to play back our albums in the correct running order. Upgrading to the latest version of TwonkyServer fixed the problem and, luckily, the included software worked with the updated software.
Finally, the NP2900 froze up on us a few times, sometimes taking a few minutes to finally wake up, but twice requiring us to unplug it and plug it back in. It didn't happen enough to really frustrate us, but we're hoping Philips updates the firmware to iron out some of these occasional problems.
Conclusion
The Philips Streamium NP2900 sounds great and looks extremely slick. The Boom offers more features for a lower price than the NP2900, but they're similar in terms of sound quality and, if we had to look at one sat in our living room every day, we'd definitely choose the NP2900.
Additional editing by Charles Kloet
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