Philips Internet Audio Mini System

Philips Internet Audio Mini System

World Wide Radio

By David Dritsas

Even in a big city, it’s rare to hear the statement, “We have the best radio stations here.” It is usually quite the opposite. But the wild world of Internet radio has been streaming across the Web to anyone with an Internet connection without the restrictions of geography and ad dollars. They can be a great source of the music you want. Unfortunately, such stations are limited to Internet-enabled devices, in most cases PCs. But Philips is taking it out of the hands of the PC.

The Philips FW-i1000 is not the first device to incorporate Internet radio, but it is the first to take the approach of making Internet radio tuning a feature of a hi-fi system. In order to use the Internet radio feature of Philips’ system you must have a broadband Internet connection, such as DSL or Cable. You connect the device to the ‘Net with an RJ45 cable (a.k.a. Ethernet cable), which Philips provides in the box. As most broadband modems only connect one device in the home, you will probably need a router to share the connection.

The FW-i1000 is a 240-watt mini system with two 3-way speakers. It has a 3-CD carousel which plays back CD-R/RW with MP3s, two tape cassette decks and a traditional FM tuner. There are a number of connections in the back including a line-out for an external subwoofer, RCA analog outputs, digital audio output and of course the RJ45 jack. Connecting the device is a no-brainer. All you do is plug in the Ethernet cable and press the connect button. The box automatically connects under a Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) in which the i1000′s IP address is assigned by the server (in a home environment, a router). In the event that you are not connecting and need to input a predetermined IP address you can input it, following directions printed in the manual. Once connected we were tuning in stations from all over the world. From Japanese New Age, to Austrian Chamber Music, to Russian Pop Music. Stations can be selected by genre, region or language. You can flip through stations using controls on the CD user interface that are marked orange to indicate that they are active controls when the i1000 is in Internet mode.

Tuning freely can be fun, but because there are massive amounts of stations internationally it can be a bit overwhelming to remember what station is where. Philips uses iM Networks, an Internet tuning service, to bring the Web radio to the i1000 and you can go to its Web site to survey available stations, searching by kind of music and quality of transmission. Each is briefly rated by iM Networks on how good it thinks the station is. Stations are organized by a number (band:station) that can be inputted into the i1000. If you find a station you really like, say 230:100 Hillbilly Radio MP3, you can input it as one of the 40 possible presets.

Having access to so many stations all over the world is an absolute joy, but the i1000 is not without its drawbacks. iM Networks only streams stations that transmit MP3 music. WMA or other CODEC-based stations will not work. Other problems are the fault of Internet radio market itself. For one, the quality of the sound is not as good as a CD or even terrestrially broadcast radio (though it is not what we would call bad). Each station varies, streaming signals anywhere from 128kbps or lower. The other problem, depending on how you look at it, is the dependency on broadband, which is still averaging $50 per month. A third problem is with the infrastructure of Internet radio itself. Some recent U.S. Federal Court rulings on copyright law may force terrestrial radio stations with complementary Web broadcasts to cease the Internet transmission.

Even so, there are still thousands of Web stations broadcasting successfully at present and if all stays well, the i1000 does a great job at reeling them in.