Philips Streamium NP1100

Streaming devices such as the Philips Streamium NP1100 take music held on a computer and allow you to listen to it elsewhere in the home.

Some of them work with both music and video but the NP1100 is dedicated solely to music. It has no speakers so you’ll need to connect it to an amplifier or a set of speakers, or use the headphone socket on the reader, in order to hear anything.

The good news is that the NP1100 was fairly easy to set up. There’s a socket to attach it to a wired network if your hi-fi is near the router, or it can connect to a home wireless network.

This was again simple to configure – there are no controls on the unit, giving it a nice clean look, so network names and passwords are typed in using the supplied remote control. Once we were connected, sound quality was good, even from internet radio stations (although the quality of these will depend on what you listen to and where the station is coming from in the world). There are standard phono and digital coaxial outputs to connect it up.

The player’s display is bright and clear, with white text against a blue background, but because of the type of screen Philips has used it becomes very hard to read if you move at an angle to the player – users really need to be standing right in front of it to avoid eye strain. The menu system was easy to follow, but it was very slow to move from one option to the next and came up with a few error messages that said so little they were useless.

Connection to our test PCs was flaky and dropped out from time to time, and there were only limited ways to get at the songs by artist or title – the device started by making us browse a long list of them – over 30,000 in our case, which didn’t make for a pleasant listening experience.

In all, the NP1100’s ease of use and impressive sound quality could not make up for its annoying display and the poor choice it gave us in trying to access our music collection.