So I'm excited about my new Roku Soundbridge, and it got me thinking about networked audio in general. There are a few products out on the market right now (Airport Express, Squeezebox, etc..) that are aiming at making our audio available over Wifi and wired networks. My question to everyone: where they see networked audio going in the coming years?

Airport Express is nice, but let's be honest, it's not very practical. Getting up to the computer every time you want to change a song doesn't seem like the most pleasant user experience. Would a remote control make sense on this device considering the display would be plugged into a power socket?

On the other hand, we have the Roku Soundbridge that strikes a nice balance. It's audio features are basically the same as Airport express. However, it's got a nice UI, remote control, and beautiful industrial design. On top of these pros, you can also choose from two different sizes. Being able to browse your music from your couch is a huge plus for Roku.

What kinds of features would you like to see added to these types of devices?

Check out Roku's Soundbridge here: www.rokulabs.com

I'll be interested to hear what you guys think.


Kevin

I envision networking being built into the next generation of home theater receivers, so that we won't need an outboard unit like a Soundbridge or Squeezebox .

I agree with krabapple. What is needed is for receiver units to have network access and decoding capabilities for several formats. I don't think any real standard other than data transfer standards (which exist) are needed to do this properly.

With Apple's solution, the computer is doing the decoding then sending it over the network to the AE device which plays it. Okay, it transcodes to Apple Lossless to reduce bandwidth use, but that's pretty irrelevant really. If the box sitting in the HT system simply could read the files from the computer, and decode them, it does everything you need it to do. Remote control is then very easy, because it's the box itself doing the decoding, you don't need to be able to send commands to the computer over the network. Bandwidth use is as minimal as possible if you're using compressed music already.

Want to make the killer HT device? Take a normal receiver unit, and build a low end computer into it. It needs to be able to have a video display for music choices and/or visualization, a network connection that can talk the most common protocols (SAMBA like file sharing, maybe NFS) to get the music, a CPU with enough power to decode that or future streams (and 1 ghz is way, way more than enough), some small amount of RAM for a buffer to prevent problems due to network delay (even CD players have a RAM buffer nowadays, so that's easy), and it needs to have user upgradable firmware (preferably open sourced, so that the user base can add functionality to the unit like new music formats or visualizations or network protocols or whatever). But the big deal is that you should sell it both as a standalone add-on component for a system as well as integrated into the receiver.

You can also make a version with a hard drive and CD writer where you can store music, burn music and such, if you want. This is not necessary, but possible. Make that into a DVD writer with a huge hard drive (250 meg, with capabilities of handling up to a terrabyte or more) and add video and Tivo-like capabilities (that don't suck like all PVR's except for Tivo so far), and you have yourself a complete home media solution.

My ultimate networked HiFi component would offer:

• All control software and format decoders run on the client side. This makes it possible to support future codecs/formats/filesystems with a simple software upgrade on the host.
• Open standards compliance - eg using FLAC to stream audio and XML to send control data back to the host.
• SPDIF out of the uncompressed audio stream
• Optional: Ability to losslessly encode a stream coming in and send it to the PC.

Other things (CD writing, recording, etc.) are more easily and robustly handled by the host PC. I would prefer this component to be independent of my Amplifier, CD Player or anything else. Unlike Otto42, I don't want a PC in a reciever box. I want a simple box that can decode a FLAC stream from the network (including some sort of tag format) and upload IR remote commands to the host PC for processing.