Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #36722 in Consumer Electronics
• Brand: Philips
• Model: WACS700/05
• Dimensions: .2 pounds

Manufacturer's Description

Philips Streamium Wireless Music Centre - winner of the T3 Gold Award, December 2005

Store your entire CD collection on a 40 GB hard disk and listen in every room. You can listen to different music in every room and your music can finally follow you wherever you are in your home. With Philips 2- way remote control, you can now navigate through hundreds of songs easily with one simple press of the remote control.

Fill your home with music

With wireless streaming, you do not have to wait to download a large file on your audio device before being able to listen to your favourite songs. Instead, the music is sent in a continuous stream and is played as it arrives - it can stream to up to 5 music stations at the same time. With additional music stations, your music can now follow you everywhere in your home. Different family members in up to five different rooms can access and listen to their own choice of music from the Wireless Music Centre at the same time.

With Philips 2- way remote control, you can now navigate through hundreds of songs easily with the one simple press of the remote control. Displaying six lines of info listed according to playlist, album, artist, genre or track, this intuitive navigation offers speedy scrolling through hundreds of files.

Save time and space
No more searching through hundreds of your CDs to find your favourite track by a particular artist. With the inituitive built-in User Interface, the Philips Wireless Music Centre allows almost instantaneous access to your stored digital music collection on the hard disk (up to 750 CDs). You can go straight to the music you want to listen to, listed by Artist, Album, Playlist, Genre or Tracks. Be your own DJ at your home party and simultaneously broadcast your favourite dance music from the Wireless Music Centre to all Wireless Music Stations installed in various parts of your home. Great for parties!

Let the music follow you
The 'Music Follows Me' feature allows you to bring your favourite music from room to room in your house without having to restart navigation and playback of that particular track. By simply pressing a button, the Music Centre can 'track' your movements and your favourite song will follow you anywhere you go in your house - where ever you have a music station.

Speakers for superb sound
The Super Sound Panel Speaker system is optimized for low to high frequencies to produce quality audio sound with greatly reduced distortion, yet without having a big thick woofer. By using Flat plexipistonTM speaker technology, the centre can achieve full range sound performance with a flat design and compact size.

Box Contents

Customer Reviews

Looks good but twice failed!
Within hours of purchasing one of these, the satellite system would not power up. I did the usual tests on the plug etc and finally decided i had to send it back. The replacement arrived eventually. Again the satellite system failed but only after loading all of my music onto its hard drive (hours of copying). Even the main system had gliches. Inserting album title in by hand became a problem as the system began to jump around the alphabet without allowing me to select the chosen letters. I really wanted this system to work. I loved the look and it took up little space but AVOID! Don't take the risk. I was out of pocket for 4 months in total before getting a full-refund.

Waste of time and money
I bought a WACS 700/05 18 months ago and it has been a nightmare since day one. You can hear the radio on the background as you play CD's, the CD reader is rubbish, the software provided is not compatible with Vista or Mac, it switches on and off at its own will.... My advice is: buy yourself two (or more) ipods + speakers, is cheaper and more reliable. Philips have not got this one right just yet. I cannot urge anyone strongly enough to stay away from these.

A truly great piece of kit let down by poor instructions
I would have given this system 5 stars but for the instructions which do not deal adequately with some installation issues.

I was given the centre and satellite for Christmas and it worked straight out of the box - however the system must have been in storage for months, if not years, as it had the original firmware and and an old Gracenote database which did not recognize many of my CD's.
It is at this point that, unless you are computer-literate and have access to a computer connected to the internet, you could become very frustrated. I guess most people who buy this system will, like me, already have a computer and wireless internet access as it is in this situation that the Streamium system really comes into it own.

In fact I have several PC's on a wireless network using Livebox for internet access. With such a system, assuming that Philips Media Manager (PMM) is installed on each computer, then both the Streamium centre and the satellite(s) can play any of the music stored on any of the computers. If you also install Philips Wireless Audio Device Manager (WADM) on the PC then it too can play the music stored on the Streamium centre.

I downloaded the latest firmware from Philips and successfully updated the Streamium centre via the ethernet cable using the WADM software. I then updated the satellite's firmware wirelessly using WADM. I also updated the centre's Gracenote database using a CD-ROM (just to see how it worked) but you could do this wirelessly as well.

You have to invest more time in all of this than you would expect because the instructions provided by Philips are either inadequate or just plain wrong. For example the 2-way remote control provided with the centre CANNOT access many of the centre's advanced functions (such as setting up the wireless connection) even though the instructions imply that you CAN and the error message you get if you do use the remote is not even listed in the instructions. You can instead use the buttons on the front panel for setting up the wireless connection UNTIL you come to enter the WEP or WPA code for you wireless router which then requires the remote control. And here it gets really stupid - you have to use the 1-way remote control (which comes with the satellite) to enter this code. I only found this out by visiting the excellent Streamium forum at www.streamiumcafe.com

Both the centre and station(s) should be configured for wireless connection with the router (so that both can get music direct from your PC's) so you have to go through this exercise again for each station. Entering a 20 character WEP using the remote control requires some degree of patience!

Now my Streamium is all working I have junked my old hifi system which with its big speakers and associated CD storage shelves which all took up far too much room. The Streamium system is far neater and now I have ripped all my CD's these can be stored in the garage. The centre produces really good quality sound and, considering its size, the satellite's sound is also amazing.

One last piece of advice - there is an excellent freeware called WACHANDLER which provides a much improved PC interface to the Streamium system.