Product Reviews

We've seen some impressive wireless audio streaming devices of late. The Sonos Digital Music System, for instance, equips you with a TFT-based remote to control your audio, while the Slim Devices Squeezebox 3 allows you to get music from your PC to speakers in another room via standard 802.11b/g networks.

By plugging the USB music transmitter into your PC, Logitech's Wireless Music System is perhaps the simplest and cheapest form of wireless music streaming. It uses an adapted version of Bluetooth to transmit to the base station, and setup was ridiculously simple.

To use the Wireless Music System, you'll first need to load a playlist into your audio player, since there's no

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way to browse your MP3 collection from afar. The remote control will work with the major player applications, but only for simple start/stop, track skip and volume functions. The receiver station connects to any audio device with analog line-level inputs using either a 3.5mm stereo jack or a pair of RCA phono jacks. Using the RCA jacks, we streamed music from about 20ft away with no stuttering and with good-quality audio. Logitech's claim of 330ft is optimistic, though - we experienced stuttering when moving the transmitter and receiver from their respective desks down to the floor.

Since the USB transmitter acts as a sound card-cum-Bluetooth transmitter, anything that would play through your PC's speakers can be played with the Wireless Music System. There are no format restrictions or DRM problems with playback. The direct streaming can be frustrating, though, as once your media player is playing music to the base station, you can't use the same application to play anything else on the host PC.

The Wireless Music System for PC is nowhere near as flexible or powerful as either the Sonos or Squeezebox, largely because of the lack of a screen. But if you want a simple and inexpensive way of getting PC-based music in a different room, this is the best choice yet.