Reviews: Loving my Philips WACS7000

As with a lot of people, music plays an important part of my life. When I get home I fire up the music no matter what I'm doing. Cleaning the house, getting changed ready to go out, or whatever... there's music on.

Up until recently I've had a Panasonic 5 disc changer, which did a job. Being able to load 5 discs and stick it on a full random meant I wasn't bored for a while. I was content with that, even happy, but when I thought about it, 5 discs, 50(ish) tracks... come on, I can fit more than that on my phone!
So time had obviously come to upgrade my downgradings and look for a better music solution.

Having an mp3 player I could have simply brought a docking station with some nifty speakers and blasted that out whenever the mood took. But one thing that has always annoyed me is when I leave the room, only to go back in 5mins time to catch the last snippet of my favourite tune. I needed a system, which enabled me to broadcast my music around the house. Step forward the Philips Streamium WACS7000.

With this system you get a main station and a sub station that wirelessly connect. No need for a computer or even a wireless home network. These little babies can see each other quite happily and at a decent range, mine are over 10 meters apart, although I am using a wireless router, which can apparently double the range.

The Philips WACS 7000 - 80GB Wireless Music Center & Station comes with a 80gb hard drive, which is more than enough for me at the moment and certainly an improvement on my 5 disc system!
The two-way remote control is also a little belter as it reads out the menu off your system on a handy 2.5" screen, so no need to keep jumping up to see what your selecting.

As for the operating system and the software, I would say its very easy to get up and running and its an intuitive interface. All the expected features are there, such as a search function, play songs from the same artist, genre etc... etc...

The sound is also very good, although this did take a little tweaking to get the bass just right. I did go through a stage of building a separates system, spending over £2000 on all the components and gold plated banana plugs etc... The sound isn't as good as that, but I didn't expect it to be!

So what puts this system head and shoulders above others. Well, it’s the main feature. The Broadcast function and Music Follows me function. No longer do I have to miss my favourite track, and no longer do you have to have a party in only one room of your house. By pressing a single button you can either broadcast to all your substations from your centre or you can set off the music follows me to keep the same track playing in the room your going to... I'm in music heaven!

Its also very scalable. You can obtain a free ipod dock that plugs into the system or simply plug in a usb storage device containing mp3s to expand the music offerings. It also supports UPNP which is now available on some mobile phones such as the Nokia N80 or N95 and PC media servers (Tversity is worth a look).

So do I work for Philips... No. Therefore I will say there could have been some improvements. For £540 I feel there could have been a slightly larger hard-drive. Also the substations sound quality is a little second rate and the software doesn't seem to function quite as well. More than once when scrolling through tracks or turning the volume up or down it doesn't stop (sorry neighbours!). Although hopefully a firmware upgrade will solve this problem.
Transferring tracks onto the system from your computer or ripping them from a CD you can put into the unit can also take a while... but hey, you've only got to do it once and its on there.

Overall I love this system, it looks very stylish, it sounds great and it has that all-important wireless functionality, I know I won't be changing it for a while. In-fact the only thing I'll be doing is adding more substations.