Logitech Squeezebox DUET > Reviews (2)

I had been thinking about buying one of these for several months, and this year, my wonderful wife gave me the money to go and buy one. I bought it from Richer Sounds for £225. This story has a happy ending, so don't give up after the first part.

I connected it all up as per the instructions, and had problems from the start, the wireless wouldn't connect at all using WPA, had to set my WLAN to WEP, it took several attempts before it would connect, then when the controller went to sleep, it failed to reconnect when woken up. Whenever I got it working, the following morning it would be unable to connect again. Factory resets in abundance, but never any improvement. In the first 30 days of ownership, I probably managed to get 3 days of use out of it. I went away on holiday, and when I got back, contacted Richer Sounds. Although I had already passed their 30 day exchange period by a couple of weeks, they offered to exchange it for me, and put one on one side so I could collect it at the weekend.

I got the new one home, and followed the instructions to the letter (as before). I had already set my WLAN back to WPA (BT Home Hub v1.0). The new unit connected immediately, found the receiver, set that up, found Squezecenter, connected to it, and within 10 minutes I was playing music!

It has been running now for over 4 weeks without so much as a hiccup. It's been through power cuts and router restarts without complaint. A completely different experience.

I have the receiver unit connected to my lounge system using the optical output. Nearly all of my music library has been ripped to flac using (the free) Exact Audio Copy (EAC). Some is mp3 or WMA as I had already ripped it to go on my mp3 player.

Sound quality is every bit as good as the original CDs. You can tell the difference between a flac rip and an mp3 rip, but you'd expect that anyway. Searching through the library is a good as it could be on a small display. I have about 20,000 tracks in total, and once the controller has sync'd to the database, scrolling is very fast. You need to practice though, as the scroll wheel has acceleration built in, the longer you wind it, the faster the display scrolls. Don't give up though. After a few days of use it becomes second nature. Album art is displayed on the controller screen if it is present on the database. The biggest problem is with dodgy tags on the music files. When you rip a CD, album and track info. for that disc is obtained from an online cddb database. Some people have strange ideas about tagging music, so you will need to edit the tags afterwards. Particularly with classical music, as the tag fields are more suited to modern music. (e.g. is the Artist "Beethoven", or "The Royal Philharmonic"?)

I find that I use the option to browse the music folders more often than browsing by Artist or Album. This is easier for me as I have everything neatly ordered in alphabetic groups. You can sit and browse your library, and when you find a track you want to listen to, either play it straight away, or add it to the play list.

It is possible to add a second receiver to another audio system, and select the required playback location from the remote. The second receiver isn't stricly necessary though, as you can install software on a PC that allows it to simulate a receiver, and select it from the controller when it is active.

You can also set it up so it switches on the PC that has the music database on it when you pick up the controller (using magic packet). You obviously need to wait for the computer to boot though. My PC is set up with multiple users, so I have configured Squeezecenter to run as a service (described in the online instructions). This means you don't have to log on to the PC to get to the music library, just turn it on.

All in all this is a wonderful gadget. It was simple to set up, is simple to use, and quality is excellent.

Problems:
You need to disable McAfee virus checker whilst scanning the music library, otherwise it fails to scan properly.
You must get the tags right, otherwise the music is not listed sensibly.