Philips Streamium SLA5520 review

The Philips Streamium SLA5520 might not look as good as either the Pinnacle SoundBridge or Slim Devices' Squeezebox 3, but it's a simple and inexpensive device with everything you need.

The Streamium has a silver plastic case with a small screen in the middle. It's compact and should fit unobtrusively into any room. Where the more expensive players include several audio outputs, the Philips has just one. This is a 3.5mm jack socket, so you can plug a set of monitor speakers straight in. If you want to connect it to your hi-fi system, you can connect a jack plug to a twin phono adapter cable. Helpfully, a cable is included.

Networking options

The Streamium's networking options are equally simple. It's the only player in this group test that can't be connected to a wired Ethernet network, but 802.11g wireless is built in. There's no visible wireless antenna - it's built into the player's case. Unlike the more expensive Pinnacle SoundBridge, the Streamium can be connected to networks that use WPA encryption. WPA is more secure than the older WEP standard and if you use Windows XP with Service Pack 2, it's easier to set up. It can even store several network profiles, so you could move it between several networks at home and work without having to constantly reconfigure the network settings.

Setting up the Streamium itself is easy, with menus that are simple to follow using the player's remote control. Philips includes its own music server software for your computer. This is straightforward to use, but as the SLA5520 is UPnP-compatible, you can use Microsoft's excellent and free Windows Media Connect server instead. This is easy to use and it allows you to play WMA-DRM music that you've downloaded. We also tested the Streamium with the Twonky UPnP MediaServer and it worked perfectly.

Internet radio

When we last reviewed the SLA5520, we couldn't get it to play internet radio. This is no longer a problem and, after registering and rebooting the player, we were able to tune in easily to a number of stations. Both the radio and Live365 internet radio services are supported, giving you a good range of stations and music to listen to.

The Streamium's only significant weakness is its display. At first glance it looks as if it has a large screen, but only the area at the centre of the large black rectangle actually displays any information. Where both the SoundBridge and Squeezebox devices use vacuum fluorescent displays that light up in a vivid green colour, the Streamium's display uses LCD technology. This displays royal blue text on a dark background, using six lines of fairly small text. It isn't particularly easy to read when you're standing right in front of the player and it becomes difficult to operate from a distance. You'll need to position the player fairly close to your sofa in order to use it comfortably.

Fortunately, the Streamium's remote control is far better. As well as controls to play, stop and adjust the volume, it includes several handy shortcut buttons that take you to the settings page and home screen. In the middle, there are four directional navigation buttons and a large OK button that you use to choose tracks and settings.