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  #1 written by R. Shankar
  February 20, 2010 - 2:28 am

  Quote

  The thought of centralizing all your music on a network attached storage and be able to play from anywhere in the house sounds fantastic. Especially being able to play from places like kitchen wirelessly is fantastic.

  Setup I use: Linksys NAS200 Storage centrally located with inbuilt media center support.

  Comments:
  
  1. If you do buy one, immediately download the latest firmware and update. It will save you lot of distress. It seems version 1.0 is more like a functional test version. You would need to connect the player to network and access it through a browser. You really do not need to install mcrew server for this. point the browser to the right IP address of the player and enter “root” and no password to login.Note that the player can be made to show the IP address by using remote(net info)

  2. With the latest firmware, you can setup the wireless SSID and key on the player itself. The key information is hard to enter. use forwards and backwards buttons to advance to the next position. use Next and Back buttons to increase or decrease the number/digit. I do not believe this is written anywhere in the manual.

  3. Sound quality is fantastic. Price is right. Small, but complete with speakers (unlike logitech and few others, who require that you buy the whole kit and many of those network receivers require that you hook up speakers, which could be painful in places like kitchen)

  Current problems I have:
  
  Central NAS I have has around 500 songs with sub directories for various categories. Also I have the play lists.
  
  1. Player does not show playlists. This player can play playlist from the supplied mcrew software on PC only
  
  2. Player takes forever to hookup to this media server. The media server has around 500 songs and some video files. It takes around 15 mins or so to load. Not sure what is the problem. It is frustrating.
  
  3. Continuing on #1, player does not connect to web radio and such w/o the mcrew server
  
  It would be excellent if the future network audio players stay away from having the requirement of connecting to a PC. They should instead serve directly from the web and also from any media server(like the one I described here).

  May be the next version will be better. I also expect that these players to be more standards based in regards to playlist and such.
  Rating: 3 / 5

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  #2 written by Hiten Patel
  February 20, 2010 - 5:00 am

  Quote

  I was given this unit as a gift. I had pledged never to buy a Sony unit that needs software after the software that came with it’s MD disc players was terrible beyond belief. I then read an article in Wired Mag saying how fantastic a company SONY was with engineering and how terrible it was with software. I said to myself, “So RIGHT!”

  History repeats itself. This is a fantastic product, looks excellent, sounds decent (not fantastic), but try installing the M-Server software and try streaming mp3 over Wi-Fi. If you succeed, you will be the lucky 1 in 10. I couldn’t get it to work and checked “opinion” sites and “user review” sites and read the disaster tales. So after 4 years, Sony tries it hands at a consumer music device and fails again. For a company that makes a fantastic (but expensive) laptop and excellent flat screen TV’s, it’s a bit surprising that they can’t get software right! Maybe they make their hardware in China and software in Japan!

  I believe that retailers they have a sale going on for this unit. Pick it up if you find it for less than $50, because that’s about all this is worth.
  
  Rating: 1 / 5

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