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Product Reviews
The Slim Devices Squeezebox3

Setup

For some reason I could not get my SMC2804WBRP-G router working wirelessly with it. It worked fine wired - in fact wired setup was extremely simple, taking under a minute. I attributed my wireless setup problems to poor router firmware and changed my router to a ubiquitous Linksys WRT54G, which works perfectly, including with 3rd party DD-WRT router firmware.

I was unable to consistently get the unit to operate with SSID broadcast disabled, but it worked well with a 63-character WPA passphrase and a fixed IP address.

I had installed the software earlier to familiarize myself with the UI and the Squeezebox hardware using the SoftSqueeze software emulator, so once I solved the initial wireless networking problems and connected it to my home theatre receiver, that was it.

Operation

The Squeezebox is unlike any device you have ever operated. Simply put, everything is "tweakable"! You can change nearly everything about how the unit operates. Some of this is through the hardware interface, some is through the software which I will cover later.

The menu system is very intuitive and easy to follow. The menus are arranged "horizontally and vertically". You scroll around them using the remote's cursor buttons. The first smaller display line shows which menu you are in and how many items are in the menu (i.e. "1 of 8") while the menu item itself is described on the large second line. You can scroll through the items in the menu using the up and down cursor buttons. Once you find an item you want to enter, you scroll the cursor to the right to enter it, or to the left to go back to the previous menu. It's very easy to navigate around the menus, and the "drill down" structure feels very natural.

The unit really has two modes, playing local files and Internet radio through SlimServer, and playing Internet radio through the Internet-equivalent of SlimServer, SqueezeNetwork. When using SlimServer, you browse or search through the music stored on your PC or on your local network. On the player, you can browse or search by artist, title, genre, filename, whatever...it's all tweakable. When browsing, you can sort through them one-by-one or you can narrow it down by typing in characters, either by scrolling up and down to increment/decrement letters or typing them in by repeated presses of a remote button like you would on a cell phone (1=punctuation1, 2=abcABC2, 3=defDEF3, etc.) Searches require at least one letter of text input. You can play music you're interested in one file at a time or you can add them to the device's playlist. You can play back pre-made playlists or you can save playlists you make for the device.

SqueezeNetwork searching and browsing works similarly, although searches are limited to genre and stream name.

Other menu items accessible through the hardware in SlimServer mode include settings such as language, screensaver when playing, screensaver when not playing, screensaver when idle/off, time format, long date format, alarm settings, library information, player information and server information. Menu items in SqueezeNetwork mode are limited to language, screensaver when playing, screensaver when idle/off, time format, long date format and alarm settings. You can also access RSS Feeds, Favorites, ambient sounds and a massive live music archive in SqueezeNetwork mode.

The unit supports an impressive range of file formats. Some are decoded natively while some are transcoded by SlimServer on-the-fly and passed to the device. The unit plays MP3, AAC, Ogg Vorbis, MP2, MusePack and WMA lossy formats, AIFF, WAV and PCM uncompressed formats with DTS pass-through, and Apple Lossless, FLAC and WMA Lossless formats.

When you are playing a file, the screen is the "Now Playing" screen. The first line will display "NOW PLAYING", followed by number of items in the playlist (i.e. 1 of 12). The Artist and Title are displayed below in the very large second line, and guess what, the data it displays can also be changed. If necessary, the line will scroll to display all the characters. The "NOW PLAYING" screen can be reconfigured as follows through repeated presses of the remote's "NOW PLAYING" key:

Each screen can be used alone or with a progress bar, time remaining bar or buffer fullness indicator.

After 30 seconds, the screensaver activates. Again, there are many screensaver options and you've already seen the two most impressive, the analog VU meter and the full-width spectrum analyzer. You can disable the screensaver or adjust the time to activation.

The screen has 4 brightness levels and can use separate levels in playback, idle and off modes. The text size can be altered so that both lines are the same size, the second line is much bigger than the first, or the second line occupies the whole screen (you'd be able to see this font from forty feet away!) The text sizes can be set individually for on and off/standby modes.

And the sound quality? In a word, incredible. Much better than a CD player in my opinion. I conducted comparison tests between the optical digital output and the analogue output since, as I indicated, the unit's DAC is at least as good as those in my A/V receiver. However it seems my receiver does not handle analogue as well as digital. The digital output was crystal clear and clean but slightly bright (grating treble). The analogue sound was not overly bright but slightly muffled in the vocals. I preferred the digital connection even though the high treble can be irritating at high volumes.

The unit's headphone output, which uses the Squeezebox's DAC, sounds fantastic. Much better than the analogue connection to my receiver. Since the Squeezebox includes a volume control for the analogue outputs, it's perfect as a headphone source or with powered speakers.

Once set up, the unit experienced no wireless connection problems. Signal strength is 80-85% and remained so even when my wireless laptop ten feet away was down to "fair" signal strength and a 1 Mbps transfer rate. The buffer fills quickly at the start of a song and for files less than 5 MB in size it can store the entire song in the buffer. The buffer then slowly empties throughout play and is refilled when playing back the next song. I have not encountered any sound dropouts caused by poor wireless bandwidth or buffer underruns, even when playing 1 Mbps FLAC files.

The unit does not go "off" as you would expect. Instead it goes into standby, and the screen will only go off if you select the "None" screensaver. The unit is effectively paused and will start playing right where you left off when you take it out of standby.

Regarding the remote, my Marantz RC1400 universal remote handles the Slim Devices remote's IR codes perfectly.