Philips Streamium NP2500 review: Philips Streamium NP2500

Digital audio streamers generally come two ways: cheap solutions like the Airport Express that lack convenience, or expensive systems like Sonos that put all your music at your fingertips. Philips has always tried to find a middle ground; last year's NP1100 offered much of the performance of the Squeezebox Classic for considerably less. The NP2500 is Philips' successor to the NP1100 (although the NP1100 is still available for sale) and it offers several improvements, most notably more file format support, including audiophile-friendly FLAC and Ogg Vorbis. The biggest change is obviously the NP2500's color LCD screen, but we found it a bit of a mixed-bag in practice; we loved the album art eye candy, but browsing the 3.5-inch screen from across the room is a pain. If you can live with its quirks, the NP2500 offers much of the functionality of the Squeezebox Classic for less money and in a pretty package, but die-hard music fans looking for a wider variety of online audio service offerings will prefer the Squeezebox's perks despite its Spartan design.

Design
The NP2500 has a long, 9.9-inch rectangular shape and positioned right in the middle is a 3.5-inch color LCD screen. The screen is capable of displaying a couple lines of text, album art, and a full graphical user interface. It's a reasonable size on its own, but it looks comically small in the midst of the faceplate. The design makes more sense viewed in the full Streamium product line; the NP2500 essentially uses the step-up NP2900's design, with the speakers removed.

Still, the NP2500 would greatly benefit if the screen filled up more of the faceplate. Yes, it's easy to navigate if you're close to the unit, but the NP2500 is designed to be connected to a separate stereo or home theater system. If you're sitting on the couch, 8 feet away from the NP2500, the screen is tiny. Competing products like the Squeezebox Duet and the Sonos BU250 get around the problem with a remote that features an LCD screen, but those systems are more expensive. Meanwhile, the Apple TV is a more direct competitor that lets you browse your music collection using either the HDTV screen or via the Remote app available for the iPhone/iPod Touch. The Squeezebox Classic has a similar design, but it's text-only and is easier to read from afar.

The only buttons on the NP2500 are located on the top of the unit, and there are only four of them: power, volume up and down, and mute. That means you can't navigate your music collection using the controls on the unit; instead you have to use the remote. We would have at least liked a clickable wheel on the unit for times when the remote goes missing, or when you're standing right over the unit.

User interface and setup
The basic user interface is well-laid out, with simple menu options like Music, Internet Radio, Rhapsody, and Aux showing up on the home menu. When you start playing a song, the artist and song information show up on the display, with the album art in the background. We're meticulous about updating our album art and it was a treat to see the NP2500 automatically display it when it started playing our tracks. Album art is also available on Rhapsody tracks.

Unlike its predecessor, the NP1100, the NP2500 sports a color screen capable of showing album art.

While the NP2500 zips through the standard menus quickly, it's not quite as quick to sort through a large library of music. The competing Squeezebox Classic is much more responsive in this regard, where as the NP2500 chugs along at a slower--sometimes frustrating--speed, even when its SuperScroll function kicks in. It's not unbearable, but a bit more speed would really help the NP2500 with large libraries.

The NP2500 can feel a little sluggish when browsing through large music libraries.

As mentioned before, the only way to navigate the NP2500 is by using the included remote. It's a full-size clicker, which we like, but we did run into some issues. For example, the directional pad doesn't work exactly as you'd expect it to. Counterintuitively, the right and left directions won't move you right and left in the menus; you need to press "OK" to move right and the back button to move left. We got used to it, but occasionally we'd revert back to the more intuitive controls. Some people may also be annoyed that there's no option to fast-forward or rewind, which can be a minor annoyance, especially on podcasts. On the other hand, the remote does a good job of separating important functions like the volume rocker and playback controls, while the full number pad makes it easier to enter in search terms.

Features
Like all network music players these days, the NP2500 can tune in to the thousands of free Internet radio stations, instead of the standard AM/FM fare. If you can't stand what's available on AM/FM (neither can we) and don't want to pay for satellite radio (neither do we), there are plenty of great stations available online for just about everybody. Philips doesn't disclose what service populates its listings, but we found plenty of quality stations across several genres. If your favorite station isn't listed, you can register on Philips' Web site and add it yourself.

The NP2500 also offers access to the premium streaming-music service Rhapsody, which is a subscription service ($13 a month). Rhapsody allows you unlimited streaming from its gigantic catalog of music. We're fans of the service and the NP2500's integration is nicely done. All the albums you've stored in your library are available and you can search for new music, although it's a bit tedious with the remote. With the subscription cost, Rhapsody certainly isn't for everyone, but you can take advantage of the 30-day free trial to see if it's worth it for you.

In addition to media streamed off the Internet, the NP2500 is capable of streaming media off of a connected PC. The NP2500 comes with TwonkyServer software included, and our experience setting it up was fairly painless, which is quite a feat for a network music player. Our testing scenario included a networked-attached storage drive filled with music, including FLAC and OGG files, and we were easily able to point the TwonkyServer software at the applicable folders to create our music library.

Between Internet radio, Rhapsody, and your own music collection, the NP2500 can deliver tons of music options, but it's worth pointing out that the competing Squeezebox Classic has even more functionality. In addition to the NP2500's features, the Boom adds Pandora, Last.fm, Slacker, Live Music Archive, and MP3Tunes functionality. That might be overkill for most people, but hard-core music enthusiasts may prefer the Squeezebox's incredible array of options.

The included ports cover all the bases, including an auxiliary input to connect a portable audio player.

Around the back of the unit, the NP2500 offers up a few inputs and outputs if you want to use it with other equipment. There's a headphone jack for late-night listening, as well as a coaxial digital-audio output to connect to an AV receiver. There's a stereo-analog auxiliary input, which consists of two RCA jacks, rather than the more common minijack input. Rounding out the connectivity is an Ethernet jack.

Performance
The NP2500 is designed to be used with a separate audio system; how good the NP2500 will mostly depend on the rest of your components and the quality of the digital audio you're feeding it. Philips does include the "Full Sound" sound-processing mode, which purportedly "restores" the lost information from compressed music, but we found that it mostly boosted the bass. DBB (Dynamic Bass Boost) is another bass-boosting option, and we turned it off, too.

Apart from sound quality, we did run into a couple snags that dampened our experience a bit. The NP2500 isn't nearly as good as the Squeezebox Classic at playing back albums seamlessly (without gaps between tracks), on Rhapsody tracks, or songs from your PC. That might not matter to most listeners, but if you're listening to "Abbey Road" and there's a 3-second gap between "Sun King," "Mean Mr. Mustard," and "Polythene Pam," it can really take you out of the moment. Our other issue was that we had some difficulty getting the included TwonkyVision software to play back our albums in the correct running order. Upgrading to the latest version of TwonkyServer fixed the problem and luckily the included software worked with the updated software. Lastly, the NP2500 froze up on us a few times, sometimes taking a few minutes to finally wake up, but twice requiring us to unplug it and plug it back in. It didn't happen enough to really frustrate us, but we're hoping Philips updates the firmware to iron out some of these occasional hang-ups.

Last.fm is a part of CBS Interactive, which also publishes CNET.