Philips WACS700 Wireless Audio System

Philips has released an interesting product to compete in the very competitive networked audio space. The WACS7000 Wireless Audio System is an interesting addition to the market. They offer a two fold solution to streaming audio in your house. First you can stream music from your PC like most units and also you can store music on the internal drive. The nice thing about having both options is that if you don't have a connection to your network you can just play right from the device.

The WACS700 comes with the central until and the remote player station. That way you can have the main unit play and have the remote unit pick up the signal and replay the same stream somewhere else in your house. Philips has produced a visually beautiful device, but unfortunately it is not without its flaws.

So one of the obvious things that we saw wrong with this product right off the bat was how they were touting the inclusion of a 40gig hard drive as some massive storage unit. The product was only released a year ago, 40 gig was cheap even 3 years ago. If they are going to offer a massive internal storage device they could have at least sprung for a 120 or 250 gig drive. 40 gig is what a lot of iPods come with!

After reading some reviews people seem to complain mostly about the lack of song navigation while listening to a broadcast. Apparently you can't skip to the next song. You have to listen to the playlist all the way through. Seems like an odd limitation to include if you ask us.

You also don't have the ability to hook up external speakers to it. You must use the speakers built into the device. While this might be good for some, a lot of people are going to want to use their home speakers to listen to their music, not some sub par speakers crammed into a device.

There is also no ability to hook up a USB 2.0 drive. This would seem like a no-brainer, throw a USB port on the back and extend the storage of the unit. Maybe we'll see something in the next release.

And finally it is crazy expensive. Even after the 32% savings at Amazon it is still selling for just over one thousand dollars. The flaws mentioned about wouldn't stop us from buying something that was in the 1 to 3 hundred dollar range, but for over a thousand we want a lot more features.

So in conclusion we like some of the ideas that Philips has brought to the table, but in the end we believe they have fallen short on producing a device that people are going to flock to. Besides the obvious obstacle of the price the song navigation is severely lacking and no USB input just makes us scratch our head. As always we are hoping that their next release builds off of the things they got right and updates the things they got wrong.

If you are still interested they they are slashing prices on this unit at Amazon.

April 1, 2007

Philips WACS700 Wireless Audio System