Roku M500 first impressions

Digital Drive

Upsamplers, DACs, jitter, shakes and analogue withdrawals, this is it.

Thought I'd share my experience with Roku Soundbridge M500 that I got yesterday. I ordered it on Wed. and received it Fri. - great turn-around!
I had already installed Slimserver on my jukebox PC (running XP) - trying to get it running with the Netgear MP101 (for sale!), so I was primed and ready.
It's a tube that feels and weighs about as much as a Nestle Tollhouse Cookie roll, with power connects on one end and WiFi/Ethernet on the other. Plugged everything in and fired it up - except that I didn't install the wireless card. I'm not going wireless. Then I ran to the server PC to clear a few firewall prompts, ran back downstairs, and the Roku had found my server. I get it to connect, then the Roku displayed something about pressing and holding the BRIGHTNESS button to update Slimserver - strange. Got on the Internet and someone said to just do what it said to get past this - so I held down BRIGHTNESS and updated something or other - actually, I don't think it does anything. Got through this, then tried playing. I saw that it had found songs and was playing, but I didn't have any sound. Rebooted my server, restarted Roku - did this twice - then finally was able to get sound.
Navigated to the setup menu and updated the firmware to the latest version. Easy - fast - simple.
I'm serving FLAC, and the Slimserver is set to decode to WAV (not really transcoding, since it decodes it to WAV), so the server is sending over uncompressed WAV files, which sound great so far - better than my CD player. One of the benefits to going with Squeezbox2 or 3 is their NATIVE ability to play FLAC. There's a lot of people asking for Roku to add the codec to their next firmware update, but so far, Roku players don't support it NATIVELY - but that doesn't seem to be a problem, because you can have FLAC files decoded on-the-fly to WAV on your server before sending it to the Roku. I've monitored the CPU on my server, and it doesn't run very high - spiking every few seconds to about 60% for a fraction of a second, then back to between 2% - 20%, so the decoding isn't taking a big bite out of my server resources.
So, I'd say that for some non-tech people, it might work fine, but I didn't expect everything to go smoothly, since Slimserver is designed to work with a Slimdevice Squeezebox, which costs about twice as much, and I never expect hardware/software/network devices to work well without some fiddling. I can control Slimserver from any PC on my network - and I spend a lot of time on my laptop - so it's great to forward songs while sitting on my laptop - very cool indeed!
Some things I've noticed so far is that if you fiddle too much with Slimserver while playing music, you run the risk of stopping the song from playing. Ditto for fooling around too much with the Roku remote control. So far this morning, I've been playing music for a few hours, and it did stop a song in the middle all by itself - I had to reselect the song in Slimserver to get it to replay. Out of 30 or so songs, this has happened only once, and there is no clear reason for it. Some people at the Roku forums have reported this phenomenon - occasionally stopping songs halfway through. I expect it happens more often on wireless setups. If it happens to me too often, I'll be sending it back, but so far, there's only been the one pause.
Sound is excellent straight out of the analog outs. Looks like I'll be re-ripping all my CDs to FLAC (using EAC) now that space is so cheap. And with the error-correction of EAC, I can't imagine going back to CDs - even with a high-end CD player.
Navigation on Slimserver takes some getting used to. I'm still figuring it out. It's not for people who prefer simple, restricted interfaces. It's very much a utilitarian application, which is why I like it. It's open source, so you can modify it if you want. Written in Perl. A lot of people have written their own "plugins" that peform different functions (free to download and use). Switching songs is as quick as you would expect - click a song, and within 2 seconds, it's playing. Use the Skip song on the handheld remote, and it's pretty quick about skipping it.
So far so good. This really is what I wanted the Netgear MP101 (for sale!) to be - and might have been if it could decode FLAC or could be run with Slimserver (without some serious workarounds - cause I know it's possible - just ugly). I imagine that Squeezebox might be a little easier to set up with Slimserver, but it wasn't too bad setting up the Roku. If you buy one, expect to spend at least an hour getting them to run smoothly together. Slimserver will take some time to get to know, regardless of whether you pick a Squeezebox or a Roku unit.

This post is made possible by the generous support of people like you and our sponsors:

VH Audio

Topic - Roku M500 first impressions - benhen 11:25:05 06/17/06 (0)

You can not post to an archived thread.