Philips Streamium NP2900

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http://reviews.cnet.co.uk/digitalmusic/0,39029995,49302727,00.htm

Reviewed 26 June 2009

Reviewed by Matthew Moskovciak

When the Logitech Squeezebox Boom came out last year, it set a new standard for Wi-Fi radios. It's expensive, but offers excellent sound quality, a smart design, and tonnes of features in a tiny package. For a long time, no competing products even came close. The Philips Streamium NP2900 is the first real competitor to the Boom's dominance of the high-end Wi-Fi radio market.

The NP2900 is the first Wi-Fi radio we've seen with a colour display, and it makes the most of it with a graphical user interface that displays your album art along with your music. The NP2900 can stream music from a variety of sources (Internet radio and connected PCs, for example), and its 'living sound' feature does a surprisingly good job of making the radio sound bigger than its size.

The biggest problem with the NP2900 is its current price of around £220 -- £30 more than the Boom. It's hard to justify the extra cost when the Boom offers more streaming music services, has more responsive controls, and sounds just as good. Judged on its own merits, the NP2900 is an excellent Wi-Fi radio, with a particularly attractive design and solid sound quality, but its high price will limit its audience.

Design
The NP2900 is a slick-looking radio. Sitting atop a small silver stand, it consists of a long (35cm), slim (7cm deep) black cabinet, with rounded corners, and a tapered back panel. There's a silver strip that runs along the perimeter, and the front of the unit is dominated by a black speaker grille that surrounds the display. In terms of style, we'd rather have the NP2900 in our kitchen than the competing Boom.

The only buttons on the NP2900 are located on the top of the unit, and there are only four of them -- power, volume up and down, and mute. That means you can't navigate your music collection using the controls on the unit. Instead you have to use the remote. We would have at least liked a clickable wheel on the unit for times when the remote goes missing, or when you're standing right over the radio.

Separating the NP2900 from every other Wi-Fi radio we've reviewed is its 102mm (4-inch) colour screen. While most Wi-Fi radios have a simple monochrome display, capable of displaying a couple lines of text, the NP2900's screen is capable of displaying album art and a full graphical user interface. The screen definitely serves as eye candy -- we love that it displays all of our album art -- but it's also functional, making the device less intimidating to use for tech novices.

User interface and set-up
The basic user interface is well laid out, with simple menu options like 'music', 'Internet radio' and 'aux' showing up on the home menu. When you start playing a song, the artist and song information show up on the display, with the album art in the background. We're meticulous about updating our album art and it was a treat to see the NP2900 automatically display it when it started playing our tracks.

While the NP2900 zips through the standard menus quickly, it's not quite as quick to sort through a large library of music. The competing Boom is incredibly responsive in this regard, whereas the NP2900 chugs along at a slower -- sometimes frustrating -- speed, even when its 'superscroll' function kicks in. It's not unbearable, but slightly more speed would be welcome.

As mentioned before, the only way to navigate the NP2900 is using the included remote. It's a full-size clicker, which we like, but we did run into some issues. For example, the directional pad doesn't work exactly as you'd expect it to. Counterintuitively, the right and left directions won't move you right and left in the menus -- you need to press 'OK' to move right and the back button to move left. We got used to this eventually.

Some people may also be annoyed that there's no option to fast-forward or rewind, which can be a minor annoyance, especially in terms of podcasts. On the other hand, the remote does a good job of separating important functions like the volume rocker and playback controls, while the full number pad make it easier to enter in search terms.

Features
Like all Wi-Fi radios, the NP2900 can tune into the thousands of free Internet radio stations, instead of the standard AM/FM fare. If you can't stand what's available on AM/FM (neither can we) and don't want to pay for satellite radio (neither do we), there are plenty of great stations available online for just about everybody. Philips doesn't disclose what service populates its listings, but we found plenty of quality stations across several genres. If your favourite station isn't listed, you can register on Philips' Web site and add it yourself.

In addition to media streamed off the Internet, the NP2900 is capable of streaming media from a connected PC. The NP2900 comes with TwonkyServer software included, and our experience of setting it up was fairly painless, which is quite a feat for a network music player. Our testing scenario included a networked-attached storage drive filled with music, and we were easily able to point the TwonkyServer software at the applicable folders to create our music library.

Around the back of the unit, the NP2900 offers up a few inputs and outputs if you want to use it with other equipment. There's a headphone jack for late-night listening, as well as a coaxial digital audio output if you want to connect the NP2900 to a home-cinema receiver. If you don't need the built-in speakers of the NP2900, you can opt for the step-down NP2500. There's a stereo analogue auxiliary input, which consists of two RCA jacks, rather than the more common mini-jack input. Rounding out the connectivity is an Ethernet jack.

Performance
The NP2900 has several optional sound modes designed to enhance audio quality. The best of the bunch is 'living sound', which utilises two speakers in the back of the unit, plus some additional sound processing, to create a more room-filling sound. We're usually sceptical about sound-altering effects, but living sound is well implemented and really helps the NP2900 sound bigger than its diminutive size. 'Full sound' purportedly 'restores' the lost information from compressed music, but we found it mostly boosted the bass, which occasionally led to distortion, so we turned it off. 'Dynamic bass boost' is another bass-boosting option, and we turned it off too.

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