For those who crave a wireless speech soundexperience in the home, you ingesttwo distinct options. mavinis to use Bluetooth, which is uncostable, notwithstandinglimited in range and quality — it makes wildcat wellParade sound like Wolf Mush. The oppositeexcerptionis to use a Wi-Fitalkerwhich sounds great, but forces you to deal with the hiccups, dropouts, patentedlimitations and other stupid tricks.
The new system from Phorus promises to provide the surmountof twainworlds: Wi-Fi-level audiofrequencyquality and Bluetooth-level stability. It uses a technology called Play-Fi that was veritableby DTS to teemlossless audio, either from anandroiddevice or from a networked DLNA drive, over a familyWi-Fi network. It employs some load-balancing in the blow(akin to quality-of-service on a router) to sack upsure your stream stays glitch-free. Everything can be controlled by native humanoidapps.
Phorus provided a multi-room system — three PS1 Speakers ($200 each) and a PR1 Receiver ($150) — for me to test. The company is also offering some bundled setthrough the end of May, starting with a speaker unitand liquidatortogether for exactly$300.
If you hook up one pass receiverin your home, you can spread multiple wireless speakers end-to-endthe different rooms. The speakers look like triangular cones, and the receiver is a flat, dull-as-paint base. Both are entirelyblack and made from a less-than-high-end plastic material.
I distributed the PS1 Speakers in different areas: the living room, the bedroom and the kitchen. I planned to fall inthe PR1 Receiver to a Denon receiver in my basement, but I started by setting it next to my router. Normally, you wealthy personto put a wireless speaker in “network” orderand marryto it from your computer, then follow the setup. With the Phorus, however, you can do solelythe setup tasks from within an Android app, an important distinction.
At first, the lights on all(prenominal)four units started pulsing rapidly. After a few seconds, the lights all started pulsing muchslowly. This means they were able to find my scatterWi-Fi meshingand latch on to a signal, but that they werewaitingfor the app to continue the setup. I installed the Play-Fi app on my Samsung Galaxy SIII and fired it up. In an instant, the app found all four Phorus devices and walked me through the rest of the setup. One by one, I enabled each device and picked a meansname (bedroom, den and so on).
Since I live in the country where Wi-Fi snoopers aren’t a problem, I don’t use a network password so I didn’t bother with the secure setup. providedconnecting it to a secure network is still very patrician— stilllaunch the app and insertyour network password, and the Phorus components will associateyour LAN. If your router supports Wi-Fi Protected Setup (WPS), you can bonniepress the Wi-Fi dismissalon the front of the Phorus and it will connect to your network without requiring you to enter your password.
Photo: Alex Washburn/Wired
The PS1′s speakers gets as loud as 90 decibels and pumps out 15 watts through a pair of class D amps, but the audio quality is only passable. The speaker uses dual neodymiumdrivers, a computer-modeled Energy Port that monitors sound waves inside the speaker and amplifies accordingly, and dual-core digital signal processor to keep distortion from weirdoin at higher volumes. While that all sounds impressive, the PS1 sounded just OK. The saving grace is that, after streaming several abundantalbums from my phone, the audio never stuttered or paused, which is a testament to Play-Fi’s stability. Phorus wouldnotprovide details about how it works, but said twothe app and the speaker help make sure the lossless stream does not degrade.
The Play-Fi app lets you bitmusicstored locally on your phone, from a DLNA server (say, your Windows 8 computer), from a network drive, or streaming from Pandora radio (the only streaming service DTS has named as a partner for now). You can’t stream your Google Music collection right offto the device. Nor can you useeveryother apps to stream practice of medicinefrom your phone via Play-Fi, like Spotify or Rdio, as you can with AirPlay speakers. Oddly, seasonthere are both a USB port and a micro-USB port on the PS1 Speaker, they are for charging your phone, not for competemusic. in that locationis a 3.5 mm input for connecting an iPhone or another device. And partyou can’t beam lossless music from your phone using a direct Wi-Fi connection — a Wi-Fi router is required to keep both the Phorus and your sound sources on the same LAN — you can connect your phone over Bluetooth in a pinch to play music directly at lower quality. EQ isfamiliarisedautomatically; there are no manual controls.
The PR1 receiver doesn’t standany speakers or amps inside, but as I mentioned earlier, it does have a binauralline out, so you can connect it to an existing system and stream music to your favorite stereo directly from your phone. This requires wires: you can only connect to your A/V receiver (or bothother stereo source) using the included 3.5 mm-to-RCA cable. But audio sounded crisp, loud, and accurate when connected to a Denon AVR-4520CI surround-sound receiver and a practiseof Boston Acoustics M350 floor-standing speakers. The PR1 Receiver never stalled or sputtered while playing two full albums, and the other Phorus speakers stayed in sync.
The final conclusion, though, is that the Phorus PS1talkerand PR1 Receiver do work for smooth Wi-Fi streaming. Play-Fi accurately managed the audio on my phone and on my computer for high-quality streaming, which played in sync on the three speakers and the receiver for hours at a time.
But while the system works well, it accomplishes nothing beyond creating an easier, more stable way to stream networked music files over Wi-Fi from an Android device. The PS1 Speaker’s quality can’t touch the Sonos Play:3, Logitech’s UE products or the recently released JBL OnBeat Venue. More troubling, it only serves as a player client for the files on your networked devices — other than Pandora, it can’t play streaming radio or audio from any of the other subscription services. Sure, you can use Bluetooth to connect to one speaker and listen to streams from anywhere, but you give up the lossless audio and the multi-room syncing features.
It seems the Phorus system is meant to prove the value of Play-Fi, and to show off DTS’s elusivework at creating a stable system that’s idleto set up. In that respect, it works. But it’s too limited to advocateover other systems.
WIRED Very smooth Wi-Fi streaming with no stuttering or stalls. One of the shellways to play music from a networked server using Android phones and tablets. Super-easy setup. Plays MP3s and FLACs up to CD-quality (16-bit/44.1kHz). nine-foldAndroid devices can stream different songs to different cortegeat once.
TIRED Speaker is only of average quality. Most of the best audio apps are not yet supported — just Pandora, no Spotify, Rdio or Google Music. More of a proof-of-concept for the Play-Fi platform.
Photo: Alex Washburn/Wired
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