Sondigo Sirocco Wireless Digital Music Bridge
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Description:
The digital music revolution has spawned a new market for products no one had previously considered. What began with Napster and continued with the Apple iPod has created an unprecedented wealth of music stored on computer hard...
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The digital music revolution has spawned a new market for products no one had previously considered. What began with Napster and continued with the Apple iPod has created an unprecedented wealth of music stored on computer hard drives all over the world. Sure, you can play all those music files through your computer speakers, but if your computer is like mine, even a poor-quality MP3 is capable of better sound than my laptop’s lousy speakers. Another issue is that music sitting on a desktop in a bedroom or office is available only at that location. What if you’re sitting in front of your audio system in another room? Sondigo has a solution: the Sirocco Wireless Digital Music Bridge ($139 USD). Combined with a computer and a wireless network, this device will allow you to transmit music from any computer to whatever audio system the Sirocco is hooked up to. As Sondigo states, the Sirocco is essentially a wireless soundcard. It picks up a digital audiostream transmitted to it across your existing wireless network, and outputs digital or analog audio to your sound system. Its Dolby Digital Live capability allows it to render your music in a large variety of surround formats. I find most of these formats excessively reverberant, but they’re there if you want them. The current software version supports only Microsoft Windows; I’m told a Mac version is planned. If you’ve been following digital music trends, then you’ve probably already heard of the Sonos Music System. Essentially, the idea is the same as the Sirocco, but the Sonos system has highly specialized players and dedicated controllers. I see two potential problems with the Sonos, both of which the Sirocco solves. First is the Sonos’s high price: $999 for an entry-level system, plus $349 to $499 for additional controllers and players. At $139, the purchase of a Sirocco system is a whole lot easier to contemplate. Nor will the Sonos play anything downloaded from Apple’s iTunes store, or pretty much anything else that uses any form of proprietary format or digital rights management. But the Sirocco uses the output from your PC’s soundcard to send a digital audiostream across your wireless network, which means it can use any music format your PC can play. If your music collection contains a lot of content from iTunes or is otherwise DRM-protected, the Sirocco should prove to be a much better solution. The Sirocco is the size of an average wireless network router and even has the same type of small antenna. On the side are the power connector, three 3.5mm stereo phone jacks for supplying analog output for 5.1 channels, an optical digital output, an Ethernet jack, and the antenna. Seven indicator lights on the front panel keep you informed of the Sirocco’s various status conditions. Setup is done via a wizard, though you’ll need to know your network’s encryption methods and keys in order to get the Sirocco to connect properly. If, like me, you’re one of the few who disable their network SSIDs or do MAC address filtering, then you’ll have to make a few minor network changes before starting setup. The Sirocco supports WEP and WPA encryption standards, so you can maintain network security. (If you aren’t using encryption on your network, now is the time to fix that.) Those caveats aside, the setup wizard makes the process simple and painless. Setup is done with the Sirocco plugged into your computer via an Ethernet cable, but once that’s done, you can unplug the unit from your computer and move it to any audio system in the house. If you choose, you can even move the Sirocco from one system to another without reconfiguring it. Once setup has been completed, the Sirocco Control Panel, from which you can connect to the Sirocco, will be displayed on your PC. If you have multiple Siroccos installed, you can select the one you want to use. Once connected, the Sirocco redirects any output sent to your computer speakers across the network to your audio system: Anything you can hear on your computer will be played through your audio system instead. Again, any format you can play on your PC is automatically compatible with the Sirocco; the bad news is that all those lovely noises a Windows computer makes will also be redirected to your speakers. You can eliminate some of this using the Mixer on the Control Panel, but a few extraneous noises will still get mixed in with the music. Besides letting you connect multiple Siroccos, the Control Panel also gives you a great deal of control over the sound of your system. You can choose between two-channel or multichannel output and make adjustments to the DSP levels. The Mixer lets you independently control the volume levels of the Wave, Software Synth, and CD player outputs. Finally, the Effect tab lets you control the Environment settings (think: surround mode) and adjust the settings of a ten-band EQ -- not a bad thing when you’re playing around with MP3s, which roll off the top octave heavily. When I directly compare the Sonos and Sirocco, the only potential downside I see to the latter is its lack of a dedicated controller. This means you have to select and start your music program from a computer, which may be located in another room. While this is certainly an option, it’s not the way I see the Sirocco being most often used. If you already have a wireless network installed in the house, odds are you have one or more wireless laptops. It seems to me that the Sirocco is really designed to use your laptop as the controller, thereby eliminating the need to buy proprietary controllers, as you would with the Sonos. Using the hardware you already own makes perfect sense to me. The Sirocco’s great strength is its seemingly endless flexibility. In the time I’ve been using it I’ve played music off my own laptop, songs stored on the desktop in my office, listened to Internet radio stations, and played clips from MP3 sites. Basically, anything I previously listened to on my laptop can now be redirected to my audio system, and with greatly improved sound quality. It’s a brave new world out there. Shifts in the content-delivery paradigm have opened up product markets that were never dreamed of only ten years ago, and Sondigo is on the leading edge. Especially for people who have large libraries of downloaded digital music, the Sondigo Sirocco presents an interesting solution to a previously unforeseen problem.
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Highlights:
First is the Sonos’s high price: $999 for an entry-level system, plus $349 to $499 for additional controllers and players.
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