James Bannan03 March 2008
Designed as a self-contained hardware media player, the HomeMusic is a relatively neat and simple-looking device.
With an integrated 802.11b/g WLAN adaptor, the HomeMusic has a standard 3.5mm audio output jack which can connect the unit to powered speakers or RCA inputs on a stereo.
It’s powered by a 400MHz CPU and 16MB RAM, along with a Philips digital/analogue converter. It supports audio sample rates of 8 - 48kHz at 8- and 16-bits, stereo and mono. It handles WMA, AAC, MP3, WAV and AIFF formats, the Roku Control Protocol, UPnP AV and Windows DRM 10. Networking-wise it supports WEP, WPA, AudioIP, DHCP, TCP, Telnet and HTTP. There’s also an SD flash slot which is useful for non-networked audio playback or local firmware upgrades.
The system is relatively easy to use, but the 16 x 2 line LED doesn’t offer a lot of info. The menu isn’t particularly deep, but with only two lines to work with it’s difficult to figure out where you are.
The SoundBridge range of products are developed by Roku, but Pinnacle have the licence for the brand outside of the US. Therefore, most of the product support comes from Roku. Support is good, with updated manuals and firmware available, as well as a supported online community forum.
With the limited LED and basic setup, the HomeMusic can be tricky to connect to a secured home network — we needed a firmware update before it would work on our WPA-PSK WLAN. Internet radio streaming was accessible straight away, as was the media collection served by TwonkyVision. However, the limited LED made browsing a large music collection rather time-consuming and tedious, although playback was perfectly adequate.