When we turned off the PC that we used to use for watching TV, it also took away our ability to play music in the livingroom (since the HD TiVo that we have doesn’t support HME or HMO). So, we decided to break down and buy a couple more Squeezeboxes for the rest of the house. We got systems for the livingroom, upstairs, and the nursery.
I was a bit hesitant about the new Squeezebox v3 form factor, but when the units arrived, my opinion was totally changed. First, they’re a lot smaller than they look on the website. All the low-angle photography makes them look a lot bigger than they are. Small is good.
Second, they have much nicer displays than the Squeezebox v2 that we have in the kitchen. (We now have a total of 4). The display is larger in size as well as larger in pixels. It also supports multiple levels of brightness (per pixel) which means that the big fonts are nicely antialiased. It also means that there’s a cool mode that shows a dim spectrogram underneath the normal “Now Playing” track info display. Its really slick.
I’m going to be using the upstairs unit as an alarm clock, since the server software can turn the units on at a specified time and play any playlist. The cool thing about that is that because of the NPR podcasts, I can wake up to CarTalk on Monday, This American Life on Tuesday, etc. It’ll be great!
What do you think about Chumby?
It looks like an interesting project, but I wish it were in a better form factor. I’m just not that excited by the “plush” covers that they’re touting. I wish that it were just more like a PDA device.