 A Truly Amazing Product!!! |
| Review Date: April 16, 2008 |
| Reviewer: William A. Higgins, Decatur, GA USA |
Watch Video Here: http://www.amazon.com/review/R2PYOUYHRW3SUP Logitech Squeezebox Duet Network Music System
By William Higgins, Editor-in-Chief at http://www.5dollarmusic.com
The iPod revolutionized the personal music experience, but the Squeezebox Duet will revolutionize how you listen to music in your home!!!
I am really blown away by this product. With springtime upon us I used this the time this past week to wire my den and back porch with in-ceiling speakers. I had an old Onkyo A/V receiver that I installed in a closet to power the 2 rooms. My grand plan was to get this all setup for the Logitech Squeezebox Duet. I looked at the Sonos Music system but it was way out of my budget. The Logitech Squeezebox Duet was more than worth the money.
The install was a snap. It really only took a few minutes to setup. I did a little homework before I got the device and went ahead and installed the SqueezeCenter software on my computer first. So when I plugged in the hardware everything worked right away. No issues.
The interface is so slick and intuitive. Simple, efficient, and familiar to anyone that has used an iPod or any other portable MP3 player. I was amazed at how responsive the system is to the controls on the WiFi remote. Going from track to track, or album to album was instant, no lag. Really, I have used other music streaming systems before and some of them had a distinct lag in the controls. I am very happy to report that Slim Devices and Logitech got this right with the Duet. This is one of the few products that exceeded my expectations. |
PC Music And Stereos Unite!
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| Review Date: March 29, 2008 |
| Reviewer: Philip R. Heath, DFW |
The Good: The Logitech Squeezebox Duet Network Music System lets you wirelessly stream music from you computer or the internet to your stereo or standalone speakers to any room in your house that can access your wireless network. The iPod-esque controller also allows you control from any room that has a signal from your network giving you extreme flexibility. This device brings together the best of both worlds between mass storage of mp3 format music and quality sound of a dedicated stereo system. In addition it also brings internet radio stations and music subscription services to your home stereo to boot.
The Bad: Setup may intimidate wireless networking novices. A couple of other aspects of the setup process could be a little more user friendly as well.
Overall: This is a digital music lover's dream come true. What follows is my experience from out of the box to day to day usage.
SETUP: I had my system up and running in less than 30 minutes, and this is a pretty small investment for what you get in return. The Quick Start Guide included in the package is all you need. For the physical components, it is a breeze. Install the battery into the control, snap on the connectors for the power outlets of the controller and receiver, plug them both into an outlet, and connect the receiver to the AUX jack on your stereo or standalone speakers.
At this point, you will need to sign on to the Squeeze Network web site and create your account. They use a pretty standard registration process, and you will receive an e-mail to activate your account. Once activated, you need to download and install the Squeeze Server software. I did find it challenging to find the actual link for the download. As I mentioned in my Harmony One review, Logitech could benefit from paying more attention to the usability of their software. While this is fairly minor in the grand scheme of the product, some people will be frustrated by it.
The slowest step is downloading the Squeeze Server software that runs on your PC; however, I prefer this to having a CD-ROM that I'll never use again. While CDs are not expensive, it does save the manufacturer a little as well. Once downloaded, the installation process is very easy.
Once this is in place, you are ready to configure the controller and receiver. Once you install the battery into the controller, you are prompted to begin the configuration process. The on screen instructions are pretty straightforward. The one thing that I found annoying was around entering my wireless network information. I do not broadcast my SSID, and I use 128-bit WEP encryption. I had to use the wheel to key in my SSID by hand followed by the 26 hexadecimal key. I can understand why Logitech made this trade off because you only have to enter this information once, and alternatives would require more complicated hardware either to allow a more tactile entry on the controller or USB connectivity to your PC where you could make use of a full keyboard. Neither of these complications is really worth the cost so grit your teeth and be thanking that you only have to do it once.
A final note on setup. If you are able to connect a laptop to your wireless network, you have all the technical knowledge you need. However, if you needed the "Geek Squad" or someone else to set this up for you, you should expect to need the same level of assistance to get this device up and running.
USAGE: The Squeezebox is a great "glue" device in that it brings the best of both worlds together from digital music on my PC and my stereo. I get about half of my music electronically this days, and I really only listened to it on my computer or my mp3 player. With the Squeezebox, my complete music collection is again available to my stereo even though my computer is on a different floor of the house! I also love the fact that I have access to all of the CDs that I have ripped to mp3s through my stereo without having to change discs. I also have access to my playlists that jump from one CD to the next at will. In addition, my stereo has a poor antenna. Thanks to the Squeezebox; however, I can get crystal clear reception of any radio station that streams music over the internet. So, not only do I have access to the majority of my local radio stations, I have a wealth of additional choices for national radio stations that stream. And if that's not enough, you can also access your digital subscription music services such as Rhapsody. Simply store your login information in your Squeeze Network account, and you'll be able to stream any music through your stereo that you would using Rhapsody on your PC. There are other services as well. Of course iTunes is not included, but this isn't an Apple product so shouldn't come as a shock.
I found it easy to control all of these features from the iPod like controller. A clearly marked "home" button takes you to the main menu at any point. It was a minor adjustment to get used to the wheel feature. I have owned Sandisk mp3 players which do not use a wheel but rather a directional pad. This is a minor point. What really matters is the easy of use of the menus. The wheel drives the controller's 2.4 inch display which allows you straightforward access to your music library on your computer as well as the plethora of internet radio stations. After scrolling to your selection, the center button is used for selection. Other buttons are dedicated to volume up and down, pause, previous track, and next track buttons. All operate as expected.
Another feature accessible from the controller's main menu is a series of settings that you can change. Here you find ways to change your wallpaper, date and time format, clock settings, etc. Further, you have control over screensavers, and display dimming timers, etc.
The display itself is sharp and of the same quality of the Logitech Harmony One's display. If your collection has the album art stored with the music, you will see the album cover for the song that you are playing. This works very much the same as Windows Media Mobile does on a PDA. During radio station play it simply shows an icon of a broadcasting radio tower with the station info.
Finally, I recently had a power outage that seemed to get things out of sync between the controller and the receiver. I tried a couple of things to sort it out, but at the end of the day, the controller is a computer. So I did the equivalent of rebooting (much like you have to do with cell phones at times), and I removed the battery for about a minute - the amount of time was purely a guess. After replacing the battery, the controller booted up and everything was back to normal again.
CONCLUSION: As I said at the beginning, this is a music lover's dream. In a way, it made my home stereo relevant again. At the end of the day, you have easy setup and great, easy to use features. For me it is a no brainer five star item. |
The promise of open and easy access to all of my music finally fulfilled.
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| Review Date: April 1, 2008 |
| Reviewer: W. C. Bryant, Columbus, OH USA |
A promise fulfilled. Quick, convenient, and effortless access to both my own local music files, but also internet radio and popular online music services. Easy to configure, easier to use. Attractive, intuitive, and responsive. A wonderful solution, and I'm rediscovering music files I hadn't touched in years. That's my review, and if you're looking for a quick and easy synopsis, that's it. What follows is my experience, and it's quite a bit longer.
Several years ago, I took the time to burn all of my CDs to MP3 form. It was a relatively slow and painful process with over 400 discs, but I was completely sold on the prospect of being able to randomly shuffle through every track I owned, without having to constantly switch discs out of a player. I liked the idea of having it all on my home network, being able to listen to songs on any machine, being able to plug into my home theater/stereo, and listening to it on the big Martin Logans. There's been a certain technological divide between that notion and reality over the years. Sure, there have been various solutions. I once had a product from X-10 that wirelessly connected my desktop to my speakers. So all I had to do was pull up Windows Media Player and play things - but the signal was poor, and the hardware poorer. It was clunky, required direct intervention, and was not the "fire and forget" solution I was looking for. We tried sharing the MP3 folders, and this worked well enough to get it to the other PCs. We ran an optical cable from the PC to the pre-amp, that got it on the stereo, but this was all still pretty clunky and dissatisfying. When the Xbox 360 Pro Value Bundle came out, we were excited about the prospect of being able to use that to play music, but (for reasons I won't waste time upon here) I'm just not a big fan of Windows Media Center. What I'm getting at, is that I had thousands of MP3s, and had downloaded thousands more over the years, and for the most part they just sat quietly and untouched on one hard drive or another. Sure, I'd toss a pair of headphones on and listen on my laptop while working on a paper, or would load a few directly into the 360 in order to pull into a game, but casual listening just didn't happen.
The Squeezebox Duet changed that moments after it showed up. I was absolutely skeptical. Despite being a big fan of the quality of Logitech products that have crossed my path as of late, such as the Logitech Harmony One Advanced Universal Remote and the Wilife DVS800I LukWerks Indoor Starter Kit, I figured this was going to be an up-hill battle. I run two different non-broadcasting wireless networks (one N, one G) with WPA2 encryption, I was out of free USB ports (I assumed I'd need one, and you don't), I was afraid the interface would be slow when burdened with so many music files (Media Center choked on them). I was, as I said, skeptical.
This is going to seem a silly diversion before I get into the installation and configuration process, but I have to say it. At a time when it seems everyone is just sealing their products in that impossible-to-open sealed heavy plastic "clam" packaging, Logitech has truly made an art of packaging and presentation. Yes, even the packaging is both aesthetically pleasing, functional, and well organized. Everything is meticulously wrapped and presented, but easy to open and access. They clearly spent some time and extra money thinking about the packaging, so I'm going to spend a few words celebrating that effort, it's definitely appreciated. Out of the box, I plugged the power in for the remote base, and for the unit itself, which isn't much bigger than two decks of cards sitting side by side. I plugged an optical cable into the box, ran that to the stereo, downloaded and installed software from the SqueezeNetwork website, and put the Lithium battery in the remote. The remote walked me through the steps of connecting the handset to the network, then had me connect to the box (easy as pressing a single button on it), then had the box connect to the network as well. That was it, the whole process took no more than 10 minutes. The software on the desktop had finished scanning through my media files, and I was instantly browsing by artist, album, genre, or even year (amongst others). Ultimately, I told it to just randomly grab songs, and that's just what it did. As fast as I could browse around, I was seeing album covers and details about the songs in the visual display on the remote. The dial-based navigation quick and easy, the whole experience smooth and responsive. Even on random, I can hit a button and see what the next several songs are going to be. With a couple presses, I can leave my hard drive and connect to online streaming radio, and/or a service like Pandora. I walked through the whole of my two-story home trying to figure out where it wouldn't work, and never had it lose connection even from a floor, several walls, and about 60 feet away.
From the handset, I can flag songs that are playing as favorites for easier future access, browse details about them ranging from the technical (bitrate, file length, sample rate), to the genre, year, album name, etc. -- everything you can detail in your ID3 tags. You've got the time played and the time remaining displayed for a given track as it rolls, as well as the track number, title, and artist name (complete with the album cover, when available). When steaming over the net, the song title and time is displayed. The roughly 1.5"(w) x 2"(h) display dims and shuts down on its own after a while, and just picking up the remote brings it back to life. The handset makes this duet the dream that it is, hard for me to imagine having one without the other.
This is the solution I've desired for years. It's a brilliant piece of engineering, and an instant hit in my household. This is one of those products that I'll be enthusiastically recommending and demonstrating to my friends.
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Excellent product, but some tech knowledge required
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| Review Date: November 20, 2008 |
| Reviewer: J. Cosyn, Wooster, OH United States |
So as not to bury the lede, I'll state up front: I really like this product. It works well for me, and meets exactly the need for which I purchased it, which was: to make my entire CD collection easily and conveniently available throughout my house, in a way that was simple enough for family and friends to use without lengthy tutoring. I wanted a way to get my music from a central source to different parts of the house, wirelessly, without having to go back to a central location every time I wanted to change the music. And the Duet delivers, beautifully.
Now for the "however": this is still new technology, and for people lacking experience, knowledge and vocabulary of the technology involved, it could possibly be troublesome to set up, get working, and keep working. Many advocates of the SqueezeBox line of products (or other networked streaming music systems) seem to forget that not everybody is as savvy as they are regarding ripping; configuring router ports and DNS options; IP and MAC addresses; audio compression formats (lossy or lossless) and codecs; ID3v1, ID3v2, APEv2, and VORBIS tags; or the vast array of computer programs and tools available for handling these things.
If the list of geek-jargon terms in the preceding paragraph are unfamiliar or intimidating to you, you should still be able to use this system once it's set up, but to get it all set up and working, you will probably have to spend some time on the Internet researching and learning about those things. If the prospect of that scares you off, perhaps you can get a tech-ish friend to help you get going. But to think that a technical novice can get full use out of this system without having to learn some of the computer-networking-techie arcana is probably overly optimistic. I found it relatively painless to set the system up and get it working, but I'm a computer geek by profession; I wouldn't suggest that my parents tackle the project without assistance.
Fortunately, there is a lot of excellent information available to help the novice along, much of it in the SlimDevices Wiki at http://wiki.slimdevices.com. There is also a good support forum available at http://forums.slimdevices.com. If you are reading this review trying to evaluate the product and decide whether to purchase one, you would do well to explore the Wiki first (the Beginners Guide is excellent), and then perhaps skim through the support forum. (Remember, though, that the support forum, by its nature, gets a lot of questions and complaints from people having problems. Take that with a grain of salt, because most of the people who don't have problems don't spend time posting messages saying "I'm not having any problems.")
As for the product itself: it works very well, the sound quality is excellent, and the controller is terrific. It offers just the sort of interface I was looking for: portable, convenient, easy to use; it allows me to browse through my music collection quickly and select music in a variety of ways, including by artist, by album name, and by genre. I can also search for songs or albums by title, though it is true that entering the letters of a title via the controller can be tedious. However, I personally don't take that approach very often; I generally know what album I want to put on, and get at it by scrolling quickly through the albums or artists in my collection. The browsing/scrolling wheel works very well; I can go through over 900 albums from A to Z in seconds. The design of the interface might not be completely perfect (what in life is?) but it's very, very good, and very flexible to use.
Another feature I really like is Playlists, which should be familiar to any user of media players. Essentially, this is just a collection of songs, as many or as few as you like, which you put together and give a name, for future access. Playing a predefined playlist is very simple, quick and easy. Putting together an extensive playlist using the controller, however, can be quite tedious and time-consuming. But the good news is, you can (if you have some slight technical know-how which isn't difficult to learn) put together a playlist using any one of dozens of media-player applications on your computer, and then make it a part of the playlist collection available to your Duet.
One aspect of the Duet I hadn't given any consideration before buying is the use of Internet radio. However, after getting my own collection of music up and running, I started playing with this feature, and found several stations and services that suit me, and Internet radio (particularly the free Pandora service) is now a common source of music in my house. There are also many other options and features (too numerous to go into here), either built-in or available as "Add-Ons" from the SlimDevices website.
In summary, I'm extremely happy with my Duets, and use them to bring music (not only my own personal CD collection, but also Internet radio) to different parts of my house, with a controller that makes it easy and convenient to select what I want to listen to, and where. But people who are unfamiliar with the world of CD ripping, audio codecs, network administration and other computer-technical jabber should approach it with open eyes and a willingness to do some reading and learning, rather than just assuming it's as easy to install as an old-fashioned record player. |
Worth the wait
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| Review Date: April 9, 2008 |
| Reviewer: Peter Ulrich, Fort Collins, CO USA |
While I was frustrated with Amazon's backordered status of the Duet, I used the time to continue research on the competing Sonus (just too much money for me to justify), start converting my CDs to FLAC computer files, and planning my ultimate configuration which is serving up my music collection from a Network Attached Storage device.
But, now I have my Duet and it was worth the wait. First impressions: product "fit and finish" is outstanding - even the packaging (once I got it out of the Amazon box) made it seem a little like Christmas. First priority, start charging the remote.
Setup went quickly. Even entering the WEP security code for my wireless network was made simple. I powered the receiver up and downloaded and installed the Squeeze Center software as instructed, and started it running. The receiver was quickly identified by the remote, but the software didn't find the receiver until I cycled it by pressing the button on the front of the receiver. That was all it took.
Next step, just point the Squeeze Center application to the disc folder where the music files were, easily accomplished via the familiar browse process. With the receiver now connected to a pair of powered speakers, I picked up the remote, scrolled over to my Music Library, picked an album, and music started flowing. And sound good it does. The 24-bit digital-to-analog converters did their job. I could not discern any quality degradation from the original CD. (I chose the FLAC file format to retain the audio quality of my CDs instead of going the mp3 route. One objective is to regain the shelf space currently consumed with hundreds of CDs.)
Can't get too much easier that that! Next step? Add additional receivers and order the NAS box.
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