Customer Reviews

AudioTron Ethernet Digital Music Player for Home Networks

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I settled on a network audio appliance to play back my digital music for the convenience of being able to control the jukebox software from the appliance itself, from the remote, or from any web browser on the network, as well as the convenience of having an independent LCD display of track information.

I settled on the Audiotron because it allows me to pipe full CD-resolution wave files (16 bits, 44.1KHz samples, 1.4Mbits/second) through an optical S/P-DIF jack to my A/V receiver (Harman Kardon 325, also highly recommended). It also allows MP3 files to be passed through in the same way. The full resolution CD files sound exactly the same from the CD player with digital out, through the computer's digital out, or through the Audiotron. I was less than thrilled with the analog output piped into my A/V receiver's anlog amplifer; thus I suspect the headphone jack is similarly low quality.

The ripping software provided is OK, and has the advantage of having a really speedy (re-)tagging system for wav files (using the Microsoft standard RIFF info chunks; standard ID3 tagging is used for MP3s). It also rips fast. But I found the freeware Exact Audio Copy (EAC) program to do a much more accurate job of error-correction on hard-to-read disks, as well as putting in the right amount of between-track spacing (which is perfectly carried over when played back through the Audiotron). Used in conjunction with a freeware EAC plugin script called ATWavTag, I was able to use EAC to rip my entire CD collection with tags appropriate to the Audiotron. Without tags indicating the track number, the Audiotron will default to playing tracks in alphabetical order.

My only complaint about the Audiotron is that it's slow. With wave files, it takes about 5-10 seconds or so to skip a track, and if too many tracks are skipped at once, the buffering gets confused. That's slower than my CD player (which is now gathering dust) and way slower than doing it from the computer on which the tracks live. The web server takes 5-10 seconds to load a page when a track's playing. I would've been willing to pay more for a bigger buffer and faster processor. Finally, it takes a long long time for the Audiotron to find all the music files on the network; around 15 minutes for the 200GBs of music I have (about 5500 songs). The author of ATWavTag also supplies some useful utilities for creating tables of contents which are read in almost instantly over the network and allows the discovery process to be bypassed.

Setup was pretty straightforward, but it's hardly trivial. I had to create a Windows account for the Audiotron to get it going, and all the permissions had to be right. Then I had to figure out how to log into the administrative part of their web server (user/pwd is admin/admin, though it took me forever to figure that out, and I'm a compulsive manual reader). After that, it's just worked. If you're using Linux, you'll need the additional step of setting up a Samba server or the like to emulate Windows networking for the Audiotron's benefit. Like other non-NT-derived Windows OSes, the Audiotron's WinCE on a StrongARM processor is not the most robust. I've had to reboot it twice in as many months. Turtle Beach regularly supplies firmware upgrades, and there's a huge enthusiast community writing scripts and FAQs on how to use the Audiotron.

It also looks just like a standard audio component, though it's NAD-grey, so it doesn't match my black or silver components.

As for general usability, it's pretty easy once you get the hang of their selection system. But scrolling through a large music collection linearly by artist, especially with a lot of various artists collections, can be painful. And there's no way to drill down from artist to album or from genre to artist, on the device, though it can be done through the web interface. The remote adds some functionality like fast-forwarding through tracks, that is not available (at least in a way that I can find) through the front panel. I find the scrolling display easy to read, and I really appreciate having track information on random play; it fixes the problem with huge CD changers and never knowing what's playing.

Note: There is also a slightly more expensive version of the Audiotron that adds HPNA (home phone line) networking to the mix.

I have gone in spurts buying CDs. I have changers in my car and at home. But I find that I rarely change the CDs - too much hassle.

After installing the AudioTron system, I loaded up several hundred CDs. I was amazed at the memories of CDs from 5,10,15 years ago: I missed this music, but it would have been buried on the shelf.

Now, with AudioTron, I can run my own "stations" with music I like. I can listen 24 hrs a day for well over a week with no repeats.

Interestingly, this device has me buying more CDs! I have bought more since purchasing it than I had in the prior couple years. So much for the music industry's fear of digital media. MAKE IT EASY TO USE AND DEMAND WILL INCREASE....

The Turtle Beach AudioTron.
I am pretty good at networking, so I tried to do the advanced setup first with a direct connection to a test PC. Seemed like the best-success approach. I failed. I even reverted to reading the manual. Nothing worked. Frankly, I still don't know why, but suspect that it was a network security permissions issue (I am atypical, with a corporate level network in my home)

After setting it aside, I decided to take it to my "lab" where I could debug someone else's product. I did a factory reset, plugged into my network and everything just worked. My recommendation here: used a home gateway with DHCP (virtually all do) and use defaults.

This device installs very simply when using the defaults.

Once installed, I used Windows Media Player 9 (With copy protection turned off - fully compliant the copyright laws) to capture my CDs. With a 40x CD, capture takes a little over a minute per CD. My TDK drive uses hardware error correction to work through the scratches in some of my old CDs. I have not yet heard a defective track.

The AudioTron can scan my network for new music. Once I did that, I found over 2500 songs had been transfered. (All of these reside on my PC, not the AudioTron player. Hence the need for networking)

The user interface is very intuitive. Rotate to a selection, push to select, rotate for sub-menu. Example: Rotate to select "Play by Genre", Push. Rotate to "POP"/push (Selects POP music) Select Random and you are playing all of your POP songs. Or select by artist/album right down to the title.

Sound quality is very good. Much better than the high end speakers combinded with my PC audio card. My PC will occasionally drop out if I start a heavy disk task. But the Audiotron appears to pull in the entire song before playing. After the temporary installion, I needed to re-route the LAN network cable. While playing a song, I disconnected the cable, re-routed it and plugged it back in without, may I say, ever skipping a beat.

I would like to see this product succeed. It has been around a while. I only bought for the last Christmas as a present to my wife. At CES 2003, I checked out the competition. Yamaha has an interesting product, but at [$$$] per room. And it does not seem as good as this one. (They do use RF instead of a wired link).

I am buying a second system for my office/game room.

Overall, a very good value. You do need either wired LAN or HomePNA (a phone jack near the audio system and near the PC) plus a PC. 10GB of spare disk on a PC will store a lot of CDs. I use 128Kbps for very high quality. Each CD takes about 50 MB so 10GB will store 200 CDs.

Final PLUS.... Turtle Beach gives you free non-commercial internet 'radio' stations. Kind of like having X-Radio built in.

The Audiotron (AT) performs as advertised and then some. My current configuration consists of the AT-100, ethernet hardwired to a Linksys BEFSR41 10/100 router/switch with all the music stored on a Tritton Tri-NAS 120 network drive. With this setup, I can play music whether my computers are running or not, which, I have not seen as a feature on any of the comparable devices which all require server side software to be running on the computer (somebody feel free to correct me if I am mistaken).

BEFORE YOU BUY, I highly recommend (especially in light of some of the critisisms listed in other reviews on the AT) that you read the user's guide (available as PDF on Amazon or Turtle Beach websites) to familiarize yourself with the capabilities and limitations of the AT. That way, there are no surprizes when you get it home. THEN, read them again while you set the AT up. While the AT works pretty much right out of the box, there are a number of tweaks that will expand it's capabilities. I also made use of the extensive knowledge base on the Turtle Beach Website to find the info for configuring the AT with my NAS drive.

Also, taking the time to ensure that your MP3/WMA, file tags are fairly complete and consistent as far as Track #, Artist, Album, and Genre will make search and playback functions much more intuitive. This is accomplished quite easily if you are ripping your own but may take some time to re-edit downloaded files (which can be done with included Audiostation software or any number of shareware/freeware programs). This may seem pretty obvious, but it is apparent that some persons are having trouble with the AT's playback order. So far, I have had no problems with getting songs to play in their correct album order.

I am using the optical output and the sound is excellent. I have read in other places that the sound from the analog outputs is less than stellar so if your receiver does not include optical inputs, you may want to consider an outboard D/A converter.

All in all, I am very pleased with my Audiotron. If you READ THE USER'S GUIDE and do a little work up front to properly tag your audio files, you will have a very versatile and capable digital jukebox system.

I love this device. I have it setup in my living room, connected to my stereo and to a Linksys wireless bridge. The Audiotron can play all of my MP3s from my computer, along with hundreds of internet radio stations, all wirelessly! The simple 802.11b wireless connection easily handles the audio transmissions without problem. The Audiotron has replaced my huge 400 CD jukebox as my most used piece of stereo equipment. Searching for songs is very easy, as the Audiotron can sift through MP3 tags with ease, finding music by author, album title, music type, song title, etc. Well worth the cost!

This box is fantastic! I have it plugged into my home LAN router which enables me to access over 80GB of MP3s that I have stored across several PCs. The device is VERY simple to set up. Simply plug it in (ethernet and power), point the setup to the MP3 folders that you have specified on your PC(s) and away you go!

Each MP3 title is displayed clearly on the display (I used MusicMatch Jukebox to rip all my CDs into MP3 format). You can queue/skip/seek and everything else with the included remote. Several Internet Radio stations are available (provided the router/switch/gateway that you have it plugged into has an Internet connection).

The only downside for now is the price. It should come down a bit in the next few months but it is still rather new so it will remain in the $[money] range for while longer.

When you think about the hassle of switching CDs all the time, ask yourself: "why suffer any longer?"

BUY THIS BOX! IT ROCKS!

I use this player's digital out to a DAC to playback my whole cd collection residing on a home server upstairs. This basically allows you to rip all your cds to PCM (original bits/format) and then play them anywhere in the house. FORGET about MP3... stream the real CD PCM audio bits!

This is the future of audio... all your audio resides on a hard disk, and then it networks/fans out to players like this.

This is a great product except for: (1) Cannot play back internet radio through the digital output if the sample rate is lower than 32K. Please?? Turtle Beach explains that the SPDIF standard does not allow lower rates than that. Have you guys ever heard of oversampling??? (2) Does not remember the play list. Well, you can add songs to a "group" which stays in memory, but I'd still wish I could simple play a bunch of songs and then play them again. (3) Navigates only by tags, not by directory structure. If all your tags are set perfectly, this works wonderfully. However, in the real world mp3 files have somewhat arbitrary tags, and this can become quite a nuisance. I often don't find my files. It would be nice to have the option to simply navigate by file folder and file name.

Otherwise it's a great product! Btw, referring to an earlier review, it DOES play songs in correct album order if they are properly tagged.

I like the Audiotron a lot, but at this point I think it is getting dated and you get products with many more features at a reasonable. The one thing the Audiotron has going for it is that it looks like a normal stereo component.

Setting it up is pretty simple. Just connect it to your network and stereo, then set share music on your PCs. The Audiotron will search the network for shares and (unless otherwise configured) search for particular directory names.

The web interface allows you to log into the audiotron and change configuration or even what it is playing. Unfortunately, the interface doesn't work very well for large music collections. It doesn't allow searching and songs aren't always organization the way you would anticipate, which can make finding music frustrating.

My biggest gripe with the product is that it doesn't support the full range of WMA bit rates. I believe it is capped somewhere around 192. Unfortunately, they only tell you this deep in the knowledge base of their website. I found this after after reripping my entire collection and then spending a couple hours trying to figure out why the Audiotron wasn't playing anything. Nice customer focus people!

I have to say...I'm impressed; at least, moreso than I thought it would be.

The Pros:
Easy setup - Despite all of the mixed reviews I found online for setting this thing up, setup was a snap. If you're running XP or 2000 you'll need to create a user account on your PC (or domain) and give that user read-permissions on your audio share. Otherwise, it's simply a matter of plugging in the ethernet cable, and audio cord -- and turning the power on.

Fairly Intuitive interface on the unit. The front panel is very easy to use and navigate with the jog dial.

Large bright LCD

Fully upgradable firmware

Internet radio capable

The Cons:
Soft mushy buttons on both the front panel and remote - In my opinion, this is the number one problem with the unit.

Layout of buttons on remote control - This problem follows a close second. The remote isn't very intuitive, either. And I don't know if it's the batteries or not, but it generally takes a couple of tries before the buttons on the remote do what they're supposed to.

For future releases, I'd like to see a built in CD-Player/Ripper/Burner which allows you to listen to audio CDs or rip them to a shared folder. It would also be nice to be able to burn songs using the unit. Oh well...I guess it just goes to prove that if you ask for steak, and you get a T-Bone, you'll complain because it's not prime-rib!

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Don't take the complaining too seriously...this is a great product. I'm going to get some serious use out of this thing. It seems to play all my full albums in correct order (although I maintain all my ID3 tags), and I haven't had a problem with the sound quality.

Pick this one up if you're a music enthusiast, looking to play digital music from your PC over your component system. If you're like me, and you're sick of removable media, this is a music-lover's dream come true.

This is a great product. It works very well. I frequently use it to play internet radio stations during parties. The optical audio out works well. I have it working with a Linux computer running Samba (much more reliable than Windows). I will be purchasing another one soon. It does take a while to turn on the first time (probably because i have a lot of files) but the included Audio Station software makes a Table of Contents file which probably will help with that. Overall, great product.