Evesham M-box review

Verdict:

Evesham's M-box lets you listen to your MP3s through your stereo. The M-box is expensive, hard to set up, and incompatible with most network music players.

Review Date: 18 May 2006

Price when reviewed: inc VAT

Our Rating 2 stars out of 5

Review
Specs

The one flaw with the Philips and Logitech devices opposite is that your PC must be turned on if you want to listen to music.

Evesham's M-box does away with this hassle. It's a tiny PC, with 160GB of available storage space for all your music. You simply plug the bundled M-bridge audio player into your amp, connect both devices to your wired or wireless network using their built-in adapters and use the M-bridge to listen to your music through your stereo.

What a great idea - at least that's what we thought. Sadly it wasn't to be. For a start, there are the network problems. The M-box cannot be attached as a client to a wireless network. Instead, you have to plug the M-box into your router using an Ethernet cable, limiting where in the house you can put it. Unfortunately, the M-box's Ethernet adapter has its own pre-assigned IP address and is set up not to accept the IP address your router will inevitably try to assign to it, which is needlessly frustrating.

The M-box doesn't use uPNP technology either - the standard used by most other network music servers - and instead relies upon Apple iTunes. Although it works well with the supplied M-bridge, this does mean that you can't use it with other network music players, like the Philips Streamium. Unfortunately, you are currently tied to iTunes 5 (version 6 is the latest) and you don't even get a copy on the setup CD.

If you do manage to get the M-box up and running, it works reasonably well. It's quiet and unobtrusive, and the M-bridge music player works fine. Sound quality is good - as good as listening to the original file on your PC. The M-box doesn't support lossless audio formats though, so it doesn't get full marks for sound quality.

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