Use Your PC to Serve Up Music

Turn your PC into a music server with Turtle Beach's great-sounding, networked digital-music player.

Michael Gowan, special to PC World.com

Now that you have an incredible digitized-music collection on your hard drive, you're just itching to get those MP3s off your PC and into your living room. Turtle Beach's AudioTron network digital-music player will let you do just that. This stereo component uses a network connection to transfer music files from your computer to your stereo system. And at $300, AudioTron costs almost one-third less than stand-alone, hard-drive-based MP3 stereo components, such as the AudioRequest from Request Multimedia.

Not Your Father's Audio Component

Designed to fit in with the stereo components you already have, AudioTron comes in a sleek charcoal-colored shell that's nearly as wide as a typical stereo component but is about half as deep. If you were to open the casing, you'd find a signal processor, decoding software, and a data cache--but no hard drive, which competing devices use. Instead, your PC acts as a music server, hosting your library of MP3, WMA, and.wav files. AudioTron connects to the PC through either an Ethernet connection or a phone-line network.

The minimum PC requirements to run AudioTron are modest: a Pentium-class 150-MHz PC with an HPNA 2.0 card or a 10BaseT or 10/100BaseT Ethernet card. You'll also need Windows 98 SE, Millennium Edition, NT, or 2000.

You can use a DHCP or static-IP setup, depending on the type of network you have. (If you don't have a network setup, you can use an inexpensive Ethernet crossover cable, as long as you have a network card in your PC.) You must enable sharing on your music folder.

Music streams from the PC to AudioTron in real time.AudioTron doesn't store the data--it merely plays the digital files on your hard drive and delivers the signal to your audio receiver. The unit does buffer a few seconds of the song, just as any streaming player does. How AudioTron treats the audio signal will depend upon how you connect it to your stereo. If you're connecting to an auxiliary RCA input jack, the unit will convert the digital signal to analog. If you're using the S/PDIF optical connector found on many midrange and high-end stereo systems, the signal will remain digital as it travels into your stereo.

While the concept sounds simple, we did encounter some snafus in getting AudioTron up and running on our home network. Because our 466-MHz Celeron system was already part of an Ethernet network, we tried to connect the AudioTron to our Linksys Etherfast 4-port 10/100 DHCP router. But due to a conflict with that particular router, the device was never able to recognize the computer we set up as a music server. (Turtle Beach identified this issue after we completed our review, and now says that a firmware upgrade to the LinkSys router will correct the problem.)

Instead, we established a direct link between the Ethernet card on the PC and AudioTron by using a crossover cable and a static IP address. In switching from the default DHCP arrangement to a static IP, we had to manually enter our IP addresses into our PC's network setup and into the AudioTron through its Options menu, which you can scroll through by using a control knob on the unit's front panel.

Sweet Sounds

Once you get the network set up, AudioTron plays music very well. Even with a low-quality, 96-kilobits-per-second MP3 file--which suffered from garbled audio artifacts when played on our PC--the sound was acceptable, with no discernible defects. Still, at 320 kbps, the quality was even better: Songs sounded almost as sharp and full as the sound you'd expect from an audio CD.

The easiest way to navigate through your music folders is with the included, easy-to-use remote control (which controls AudioTron, not your PC). After AudioTron finds the PC you've set up as a music server, it pulls in artist, album, title, and genre information from each of the tracks in your music folders and stores that data in memory for you to browse through. Then, every time AudioTron powers up, it searches again for new music. You can also manually force it to look for new music, or have it look for playlists that you've created on the PC.

Frequently accessed tunes can be assigned to one of the 16 Favorites buttons on the remote. The group button makes it simple to create a playlist on the fly; however, once you turn off the power, that group will be erased. Audiotron's green-and-yellow LCD is easily visible from across the room, and gives you artist, song, album, and time while playing. On the downside, you can't search through your library while a song is playing; you must press the stop button first.

The front panel's control knob can be erratic and imprecise. Often, we found that it didn't register a turn of the dial, or that it went too far with a single twist. Unfortunately, if you need to alter the device's options settings, the knob is the only way to do it--the remote offers no means of doing so. (A Turtle Beach representative says that a downloadable firmware fix will be available for the knob sensitivity problem.)

Buggy Road Ahead

AudioTron ships with Turtle Beach's free AudioStation 4 encoding and music management software. The software will encode music as MP3s or as Windows Media Audio files, and you can also use the software to create.m3u playlists. (Though neither the AudioTron nor AudioStation currently supports streaming Internet radio, the company plans to offer that feature down the road through a downloadable firmware upgrade for the device.)

We found the software extremely buggy: It often crashed, and it sometimes created MP3 files that skipped or were unplayable. Until Turtle Beach can rectify these issues (the company says it will release a free software update in about a month to address them), you'll be better off downloading free or premium versions of popular MP3 encoding packages such as Real Jukebox or MusicMatch Jukebox.

While we ran into some problems with AudioTron's execution, these glitches don't affect the unit's overall performance--if you're willing to contend with these potential issues. Not only does AudioTron sound great, but it also might give that old Pentium you've buried in the closet a new life as a music server.