home entertainment 2007

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Larry Greenhill DESCRIPTION Two-channel, solid-state network music player with built in WiFi adapter, 400MHz Blackfin DSP chip, and 16MB buffer RAM. Connectors: Ethernet (one), analog line out ( 1 ⁄8" variable or fixed level), digital S/PDIF output (RCA coaxial and TosLink), Wired Network (Ethernet), Wireless Network (WiFi). Maximum analog line output: 2.83V peak–peak (1V RMS). Dynamic range: 90dB. THD: –90dB, typical. Signal/noise: 96dB. Sample rates supported (kHz): 8, 11, 12, 16, 22.05, 24, 32, 44.1, 48. Bit depth supported: 8, 16, stereo or mono. File formats handled: MP3, AAC, WMA, DRM WMA, WAV, AIFF, LPCM, Rhapsody Music (WMA Lossless supported only when using Windows Media Connect, which transcodes to LPCM; Apple Lossless, FLAC, Ogg-Vorbis supported with optional third-party software; protected AAC files purchased from iTunes Music Store are not supported). Online music stores supported: Rhapsody, Napster, WalMart.com, MusicNow, MSN- Music, Plays for Sure, Apple Music Store (iTunes), Musicmatch. System requirements for network: Ethernet 100BaseT RJ-45 or builtin 802.11b WiFi support, broadband Internet connection. Music-server requirements for streaming music on computers: for Windows PC, 500MHz Pentium-class processor or better; for Macintosh, 400MHz G3 processor or better; 128MB RM minimum; operating system for PC (Windows XP SP2) or Macintosh (OS X v10.15 or later). Music-server software supported: Windows Media Connect, Rhapsody, iTunes, SlimServer, MusicMatch. Number of SoundBridge network music players to call up same music library: 10 at once for non–DRM-wrapped digital files. DIMENSIONS Cylindrical: 10" (256mm) W by 2.37" (60mm) diameter. Weight: 1.5 lbs (0.7kg). FINISH Black with silver trim. SERIAL NUMBER OF UNIT REVIEWED M1001XD6D000299, purchased by reviewer. Firmware: v.2.5. PRICE $199.99. Approximate number of dealers: 1100. Guarantee: 30 days, money back. Warranty: 1 year parts & labor, transferable. MANUFACTURER Roku LLC, 399 Sherman Avenue, Suite 12, Palo Alto, CA 94306. Tel: (888) 600-7658, (650) 321-1394. Fax: (650) 321-9648. Web: www.rokulabs.com. EQUIPMENT REPORT Roku SoundBridge M1001 NETWORK MUSIC PLAYER The Roku SoundBridge M1001 network music player with remote. My interest in wireless network music players began during David Hyman’s keynote speech at Home Entertainment 2003. Then CEO of Gracenote, Inc., 1 Hyman stunned me with his opinion that CDs and DVDs were already obsolete. Rather than pursue discs with greater storage capacity, Hyman urged industry designers to design music-server units with large hard drives to allow instantaneous access to any digital music track. With all of your music stored on a central hard drive, you could, within seconds, locate a specific track among thousands just by knowing the name of the artist, song, group, composer, year of recording, or even recording venue. Music mixes could be instantly grouped into playlists by the owner. Hyman’s 30-minute talk, while spellbinding, raised issues of feasibility that 1 Gracenote, Inc., is best known for operating the Music Recognition Service (MRS), a large online database. iTunes and other Internet music stores tap into MRS to automatically label downloads with artist, song title, and other information for users to apply when copying CDs to their personal computers. Gracenote’s CD Trustee shareware program (available at www.base40.com) can automatically catalog, organize, and display an entire music collection if the user simply inserts each CD in turn in his computer’s hard drive. Gracenote’s Music Library 1.0 (www.wen software.com/MusicLibrary) is a shareware database application that allows a user to catalog and play music files and media stored on the user’s home computer. www.Stereophile.com, May 2007 67
seemed insurmountable. Would audiophiles want to spend the time required to rip their favorite tracks to a computer’s hard drive? And wouldn’t a drive large enough to hold high-definition audio files be prohibitively expensive? Only three years later, Hyman’s dream has materialized. Hard-drive storage capacity per price point has jumped almost a hundredfold. Gracenote has become the international leader in digital media technology and services, providing complete management systems for digital media. There has been explosive growth in the number of online music vendors—iTunes.com, Rhapsody. com, Urge.com, and Napster.com, to name a few—that sell or rent downloadable music to music lovers. MEASUREMENTS To measure the Roku SoundBridge M1001, my original plan was to use it to access the uncompressed test-tone data files residing in the iTunes library on the Mac mini that acts as my household music server. Unfortunately, while the Roku recognized the existence of both the library and the SlimServer software that feeds the library to my Squeezebox, I kept getting a “SERVER NOT RESPONDING” error message when I tried to browse that library. I checked that the Mac’s Network, Firewall, and Music Sharing settings were correct, but to no avail, so I ended up installing iTunes for Windows on my test lab’s PC and using that, which the SoundBridge had no problem accessing. The Roku’s analog output level into 100k ohms with its volume control set to “100%” was 813mV RMS, which is a little lower than the 1V (2.83V peak–peak) specified. The player did preserve absolute polarity; ie, was non-inverting. The output impedance at midrange and high frequencies was relatively high, at 1k ohm. This in itself will not lead to problems. However, the impedance rose to an extreme 11k ohms at 20Hz, meaning that the Roku’s bass will sound rolled-off from its analog output unless it is Fig.1 Roku SoundBridge M1001, frequency response at –12dBFS into 100k ohms (right channel dashed, 0.5dB/vertical div.). Reflecting this sea change in music distribution, John Atkinson recently reviewed three network music players: the Apple Airport Express WiFi Hub ($129, May 2005, Vol.28 No.5), the Slim Devices Squeezebox ($299, September 2006, Vol.29 No.9), and the Sonos ZP80 Bundle ($999, October 2006, Vol.29 No.10). First, he centralized his extensive home library of digital music recordings on a Mac mini’s hard drive, then wirelessly distributed digital music files to different rooms in his house over his wireless local area network (WiFi LAN). He could then use each player to wirelessly direct the streaming digital files from his hard drive to his high-end music system via a Mark Levinson No.30.6 D/A converter. John found the sound first-rate—he had to listen intently to hear any meaningful sonic differences between the networked music player’s digital output fed to the outboard DAC and the digital output of an expensive CD player playing the original CD and feeding the same DAC. Which brings me to the Roku SoundBridge M1001 network music player ($199.99). The SoundBridge can play downloaded music files that are protected by licensing software— Microsoft’s Digital Rights Management (DRM), v.10, using Windows’ Plays for Sure protocol. This seemed an excellent reason for me to buy a SoundBridge to play my own digital files. used with a preamp having an unusually high input impedance of 100k ohms or more. Even though there is still a slight low-bass rolloff into 100k ohms, of –1dB at 18Hz (fig.1), this probably won’t be audible. Of more interest in this graph is the slight response ripple evident in the midrange and treble, which implies that the Sound- Bridge uses a rather old-fashioned digital filter. Channel separation (not shown) was better than 85dB in both directions below 1kHz, but decreased to 60dB at 20kHz, which is still adequate. My primary test to examine a DAC’s resolution is to sweep a 1 ⁄3-octave bandpass filter down from 20kHz to 20Hz while the DAC decodes data representing a dithered 1kHz tone at –90dBFS. I initially had a problem in that the SoundBridge seemed very sensitive to picking up hum fields from other audio components. I had to place it well away from everything else in order to be sure that the results I measured from its analog outputs truly reflected its intrinsic performance. That performance was puzzling: the 1kHz tone was reproduced with a large positive error and a significant amount of second-harmonic content Fig.2 Roku SoundBridge M1001, 1 ⁄3-octave spectrum with noise and spuriae of dithered 1kHz tone at –90dBFS, 16-bit data (right channel dashed). 68 www.Stereophile.com, May 2007
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MAY 2007 VOL.30 NO.5 48 61 FEATURES
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