As my family was missing a music player in our kitchen, I started looking for an inexpensive, yet versatile solution that would not offend my ears quality-wise. I found it in the Pinnacle SoundBridge HomeMusic (manufactured under license by Roku and also known as Roku M-400 SoundBridge HomeMusic), accompanied by a Logitech X-230 2.1 speaker system.

The Quest

Listening to music in our kitchen had been quite a pain to date: for Christmas time I had improvised a solution using an older Satellite 1800 Toshiba laptop that could play CDs without booting and offered an almost bearable acoustic quality considering its small speakers. However, handling was more than clumsy, to say the least.

The Interim Solution

The next step was (mis-)using the wireless rear speakers of my Logitech Z-5450 5.1 THX speaker system attached to my PC in the living room by wiring a stereo signal to the rear channel inputs of the Logitech controlling unit and setting the device to 6-channel mode. The two Logi 5450 rear speakers are standalone units that only have to be connected to a power outlet. The audio signal is sent from the base and received by the speakers via a special 2.4Ghz WiFi connection that Logitech does not specify in detail. I had never expected the signal to reach from my PC to our kitchen - yet it did! Travelling a distance of about 10m with two solid stone walls inbetween. However, depending on WiFi weather conditions the connection was not always stable. In addition, the lower frequencies were missing entirely due to the small speaker size. So that was no ideal solution, either.

The Purchase

As I was looking for options, I remembered the Roku SoundBridge devices that I had come across quite a while ago. At the time, however, they had one serious problem: no support for WPA encryption on WiFi networks, only WEP - which had already been broken at the time [see Update on WPA below]. Fortunately, a new model - the Roku M-400 / Pinnacle SoundBridge HomeMusic was released in the meantime that does not have this limitation. It is missing the reportedly excellent display, the wired LAN connection and the digital outputs of the older models and only comes in a plastic instead of an aluminium package. Yet it is also a lot cheaper than the previous lineup, while basically offering the same functionality plus an additional SD-card slot at the back. Priced at a mere EUR 70,- at the time of this writing, I could not resist the temptation.

[Continued and updated roughly one year after the initial entry was created... Sorry for the slight delay! ]

The SoundBridge itself is not equipped with any loudspeakers. Thus, in order to actually listen to any music, an external speaker system is required. After reading through quite a few reviews and forum entries, I decided to go with a Logitech X-230 2.1 speaker system that I purchased for just a little more than 30 EUR. 

The Conclusion

To date I have never, ever, regretted my purchase. The SoundBridge HomeMusic turned out to be an excellent choice: nicely engineered and a breeze to use. It seems that the people who designed this truly neat gadget have actually used it themselves! And you really know that you’ve found something very special when you discover a section entitled “Geeks — read this” in the user manual describing in detail the SoundBridge’s telnet interface and all the fun you can have with it.

Choosing radio stations can easily be done by pointing your browser to www.radioroku.com. There are literally thousands of stations to choose from. You can filter the lists by country, genre, language or rating and pre-listen each station through the browser. After registering, you can even add these stations to your SoundBridge with the click of a button through a little Java applet. Now this is what I call ingenious!

Indeed, I was so enthusiastic about my SoundBridge that I acquired another one for our living room a few weeks later. This time, however, I went for an M1001 model, that I bought used at the usual place. The M1001 features a larger display, an additional LAN port as well as digital outputs and is housed inside a metal enclosure instead of the plastic case of the HomeMusic. With the latest firmware, it even supports WPA encryption on its WiFi interface. The M1001 is connected to my AV receiver through an optical cable. It is a neat little device and I’ve grown pretty fond of it.

Despite the occasional rumblings in the Roku forums about resampling noise problems that some users have observed in the Roku M1001, I have not found this to be much of a problem when listening to internet radio stations or MP3 files on my SoundBridges (the HomeMusic is essentially using the same internal hardware as the M1001).

As for the Logitech X-230 speaker system, I must admit that I was quite pleasantly surprised by its sound quality. Actually, I am inclined to believe you’d be rather hard pressed to find a better sounding 2.1 system at its price. When placed close to walls or inside a corner, the subwoofer may come out quite a bit too strong, even at the MIN position of its volume dial. This, however, can be easily remedied by stuffing a piece of cloth inside the bass port — I am using an old sock for this purpose (thouroughly cleansed, of course ).

Streaming

Besides listening to a selection of internet radio stations, I also put a 2GB SD card into the internal slot of my SoundBridge HomeMusic (which is also the maximum supported size on the SoundBridge, no SDHC unfortunately) and filled it with a selection of MP3 files. The major drawback of using the SD card is that the SoundBridge will only operate on the file and folder names on the card, without regard for any ID3 tag information that might be included inside the MP3s. Other than that, I have not observed any problems with this nice feature.

If you want to go full throttle with your MP3 files, though, a media server is required. This can be done using the free Firefly Media Server software on your PC or on a suitable NAS device such as the Linksys NSLU2 or by using a standalone device that supports the UPnP AV standard (sometimes also refered to as “DLNA CERTIFIED”).

Thanks to a firmware update for my Fritz!Box Fon WLAN 7170 that was released by the nice folks at AVM in spring 2008, I can now use the router as a UPnP AV server. The music files are stored on a USB thumbdrive that is attached to the router’s USB port — no need to have a PC running just to stream some music. The SoundBridges connect to the Fritz!Box without any problems and I can easily browse through all the titles on the USB drive by ID3 tags and listen to them whenever I want. I like this feature so much that I am no longer using the SD card inside the SoundBridge. Thanks, Roku (for including a UPnP AV client inside the SoundBridge) and AVM (for the excellent free UPnP server upgrade)!

The Future

It seems that the original Roku/Pinnacle SoundBridge have gone out of production in the meantime and, sadly, there will probably be no further development. Support also appears to vanish slowly. This is quite a pity shame, but we’ve certainly seen this happen before with other excellent hardware. Still, I would have hoped for a little more effort on the manufacturer’s side here!

I have yet to find a proper equivalent to the SoundBridge. The only real (though pricey) alternative that I have come across so far, the Logitech SqueezeBox Classic, unfortunately lacks support for UPnP servers. When I learned about this fact, I was rather taken aback — how can one not support this in a streaming client? Does everybody have to create their own niche solutions? Seriously, folks, I am appaled.