AudioTron Ethernet Digital Music Player for Home Networks
[Archived in $200 - $300, Products, TURTLE BEACH SYSTEMS]
Manufacturer: TURTLE BEACH SYSTEMS
Price at amazon.com: $206.99This item is not stocked or has been discontinued.
- Familiar "look and feel" of a home stereo component
- Streams digital audio from any PC connected to an Ethernet network
- Listen to Internet Radio broadcasts and digital music in other parts of your home
- Supports MP3, Windows Media, and WAV file formats
- Remote control lets you assign playlists and songs to "favorites" buttons
Product Description:
Compatible with networked home and business computer systems, the Ethernet Digital Music player lets you enjoy the digital audio you have stored on your computer in MP3, Windows Media (WMA) and WAV formats through your conventional stereo system. The player streams digital audio over an Ethernet or HPNA network and supports music libraries of more than 30,000 songs. This lets you consolidate your CD and MP3 collection into a single digital music library on your networked PCs. Since it works through your stereo, the player is also equipped to optimize the digital sound via analog and digital optical S/PDIF audio outputs, for potential audiophile music quality. And it fits right in to the rest of your rack, with familiar controls including random play, repeat play and song grouping. The device also comes with an integrated Web server, controlled by your PC control via its Web browser. You can also play Internet radio streaming audio in MP3 and Windows Media formats. The included remote control lets you assign up to 20 preset buttons for instantly accessing your favorite songs and Internet radio stations. Additionally, you can use multiple AudioTron players in one location, allowing several people can listen to different music or Internet radio stations. The unit measures 17 x 1.75 x 10 inches, and weighs 5.2 lbs.
From the Manufacturer AudioTron represents a new generation of home entertainment devices--a "smart stereo component" that takes full advantage of the power and convenience of home networking, yet fits right in with the rest of your home entertainment system. AudioTron uses a PC network connection to play digital music files stored on a PC's hard drive or streaming audio from Internet radio broadcasts--you don't have to be in front of your PC to enjoy the benefits of your digital music library. Storing music on your... read more
The device also comes with an integrated Web server, controlled by your PC control via its Web browser. You can also play Internet radio streaming audio in MP3 and Windows Media formats. The included remote control lets you assign up to 20 preset buttons for instantly accessing your favorite songs and Internet radio stations. Additionally, you can use multiple AudioTron players in one location, allowing several people can listen to different music or Internet radio stations.
The unit measures 17 x 1.75 x 10 inches, and weighs 5.2 lbs.Average Customer Rating: 
Comment: Great control of song playback from my laptop Rating:
I won't repeat everyone elses reviews. My message is this: I wanted to sit in my recliner with my laptop and be able to pick and choose what music was playing on my stereo. I didn't want to use the TV or another clicker to control anything. The Audiotron does a GREAT job! It has a http server built in and I can talk to it with my web browser, pick songs, play them, etc. No other software needed period.
You don't need to load/run any software on your song file server either. Any pc on your network can simply share whatever directory you like and the audiotron can see it and play songs from there.
Great product! I just wish it had 802.11b built in. I had to buy a Linksys WET11 to get wireless connectivity.
Comment: Best Network Audio Appliance for Sound Quality Rating:
I settled on a network audio appliance to play back my digital music for the convenience of being able to control the jukebox software from the appliance itself, from the remote, or from any web browser on the network, as well as the convenience of having an independent LCD display of track information.
I settled on the Audiotron because it allows me to pipe full CD-resolution wave files (16 bits, 44.1KHz samples, 1.4Mbits/second) through an optical S/P-DIF jack to my A/V receiver (Harman Kardon 325, also highly recommended). It also allows MP3 files to be passed through in the same way. The full resolution CD files sound exactly the same from the CD player with digital out, through the computer's digital out, or through the Audiotron. I was less than thrilled with the analog output piped into my A/V receiver's anlog amplifer; thus I suspect the headphone jack is similarly low quality.
The ripping software provided is OK, and has the advantage of having a really speedy (re-)tagging system for wav files (using the Microsoft standard RIFF info chunks; standard ID3 tagging is used for MP3s). It also rips fast. But I found the freeware Exact Audio Copy (EAC) program to do a much more accurate job of error-correction on hard-to-read disks, as well as putting in the right amount of between-track spacing (which is perfectly carried over when played back through the Audiotron). Used in conjunction with a freeware EAC plugin script called ATWavTag, I was able to use EAC to rip my entire CD collection with tags appropriate to the Audiotron. Without tags indicating the track number, the Audiotron will default to playing tracks in alphabetical order.
My only complaint about the Audiotron is that it's slow. With wave files, it takes about 5-10 seconds or so to skip a track, and if too many tracks are skipped at once, the buffering gets confused. That's slower than my CD player (which is now gathering dust) and way slower than doing it from the computer on which the tracks live. The web server takes 5-10 seconds to load a page when a track's playing. I would've been willing to pay more for a bigger buffer and faster processor. Finally, it takes a long long time for the Audiotron to find all the music files on the network; around 15 minutes for the 200GBs of music I have (about 5500 songs). The author of ATWavTag also supplies some useful utilities for creating tables of contents which are read in almost instantly over the network and allows the discovery process to be bypassed.
Setup was pretty straightforward, but it's hardly trivial. I had to create a Windows account for the Audiotron to get it going, and all the permissions had to be right. Then I had to figure out how to log into the administrative part of their web server (user/pwd is admin/admin, though it took me forever to figure that out, and I'm a compulsive manual reader). After that, it's just worked. If you're using Linux, you'll need the additional step of setting up a Samba server or the like to emulate Windows networking for the Audiotron's benefit. Like other non-NT-derived Windows OSes, the Audiotron's WinCE on a StrongARM processor is not the most robust. I've had to reboot it twice in as many months. Turtle Beach regularly supplies firmware upgrades, and there's a huge enthusiast community writing scripts and FAQs on how to use the Audiotron.
It also looks just like a standard audio component, though it's NAD-grey, so it doesn't match my black or silver components.
As for general usability, it's pretty easy once you get the hang of their selection system. But scrolling through a large music collection linearly by artist, especially with a lot of various artists collections, can be painful. And there's no way to drill down from artist to album or from genre to artist, on the device, though it can be done through the web interface. The remote adds some functionality like fast-forwarding through tracks, that is not available (at least in a way that I can find) through the front panel. I find the scrolling display easy to read, and I really appreciate having track information on random play; it fixes the problem with huge CD changers and never knowing what's playing.
Note: There is also a slightly more expensive version of the Audiotron that adds HPNA (home phone line) networking to the mix.
Comment: THE SINGLE MOST INCREDIBLE INVENTION EVER Rating:
The lightbulb, the telephone, the automobile- pale in comparison to this invention. For true, (no, I mean TRUE...) audiophiles, there is nothing that can compare to the ability to dial up ANY song you are in the mood for. Think of any song you feel like listening to and it's there. What else could you want from life?
Posted at November 11, 2003 06:13 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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