Introduction
The last few years has seen a rise in the desire of consumers to do more with their PCs. Going hand in hand with this has been significant thought from key players as to how best fulfill those needs. Intel, for example, is pumping tens of millions of dollars into its Viiv platform, and the buzzwords 'digital home' are now pervasive across the entire industry. Everyone, it seems, wants in on this lucrative pie.
Thinking about it for a second, the increase in hard-drive storage and broadband proliferation has made it easy for consumers to either backup their entire CD collection on their PC or, in the case of quite a few, gain thousands of music tracks by not quite so legal means. Switch on the average person's computer, snoop about, and you'll find compressed music tracks in the hundreds, if not thousands.
Allied to a reasonable set of PC speakers, most have tracks playing in the background, but what if you could share your archive with other standalone players in your home. Your hi-fi in the lounge or all-in-one CD player in the bedroom, for example. Wouldn't it be great if you could tap into the vast resource on your PC and stream your catalogue of digital music to wherever you wished?
We feel there's a huge market waiting for an easy-to-use method of streaming digital music around the home. Slim Devices certainly thinks so, and its Squeezebox aims to do exactly that, with the minimum of fuss. With that in mind, let's take it for a review spin. Read on to find out whether it's as good as it sounds (pun intended).