OTHER TECH

Remote in hand, seated in the sweet spot, I now had immediate access to the hundreds of CDs loaded on my PC's hard-disk drive. Of course, the same library could be played simultaneously on the PC itself - or on other computers or components on the network - using the SimpleCenter player.

The system offers a bunch of interesting features. Tag!, for example, lets you earmark a song and then retrieve information from the Muze Web site about the artist, get album reviews, preview tracks and so on. The Omnifi has a better memory than I do. If I turned it off while it was playing a song and then turned it on again, it automatically started where it left off.

The DMS1's front-panel display is attractive and easy on the eyes, but its onscreen display is even better. It doesn't show anything more than the front panel display, but since there's more room you can see information that would normally scroll on the smaller screen. And it looks better, too. Although I had only one Omnifi for my test setup, the SimpleCenter software can support multiple Omnifi players in different locations, and it can stream different music to each one simultaneously. The number of clients is limited only by the speed of your hard-disk drive and the bandwidth of the Ethernet or Wi-Fi connection.

Once you get over all the bells and whistles, there's the question of sound quality. Even the most high-tech system fails if it sounds bad. But the Omnifi sent very high-quality audio to my home stereo. Of course, if I told it to rip CDs at too low a bit rate, the results sounded terrible. As with any compressed-audio system, low bit-rate files are almost unlistenable, while high bit-rate files can be virtually indistinguishable from the original CDs. In particular, to my ears, MP3 files encoded at 128 kbps sounded okay, files at 160 kbps sounded good, and files at 320 kbps provided coding transparency. WMA, as I've found in the past, sounded somewhat better than MP3 at similar bit rates. WMA files at 192 kbps seemed nearly transparent to me.

For example, I listened to several MP3 versions of Delta Moon's Live. Mark my words, this Atlanta group will soon be famous. They won the 2003 International Blues Challenge, and their feisty brand of blues will get your feet stomping. Their cover of Johnny Winter's "Mean Town Blues" pits Mark Johnson's bottleneck guitar against Tom Gray's steel guitar. At low bit rates, the sound was crunchy, with some unnatural phasing thrown in to boot. At higher rates, I could hear each string singing as cleanly as on the CD. Jon Schwenke's bass solo has lots of punch. It was a bit mushy at low rates but properly taut at higher rates. On "Look Way Down That Lonesome Road," lead vocalist Gina Leigh really belts it out, with peppy drumming thrown in to keep your dancing feet happy. They will indeed be happy - but only at higher bit rates. The recording has a nice taste of room and crowd ambience, but the realism was cloaked at low bit rates.

On the other hand, because of the typically low bit rates used to stream Internet radio stations, they often sounded poor. That's not the Omnifi's fault - Internet radio ain't hi-fi. But it is a great way to find new music and explore offbeat musical paths. If you haven't sampled Internet radio, the Omnifi is a great way to do it since its navigation tools are terrific.

Aside from audio fidelity, there's the question of wireless signal fidelity. Wi-Fi distribution of data has two mandates. It must not corrupt the files with errors, and its signal must be robust. However, neither of those performance issues have anything to do with the Omnifi. They're a function of the Wi-Fi standard and the Wi-Fi components used. In this case, I was very satisfied with wireless performance of the D-Link gear. The signal was reliable throughout my house and usable out into a patio area - perhaps 20 feet outside the house. (Like all 802.11b gear, the Omnifi has a wireless range rated to be about 300 feet. In reality, it's almost always less.)

During this test, communication was not bothered by interference from household appliances. However, I noticed that on the fringe of my reception area, where signal strength was low, files coded at high bit rates seemed to suffer from more dropouts than files coded at low bit rates.

Of course, even in the face of obvious genius, any reviewer can find things to gripe about. The preproduction SimpleCenter software in my review system was buggy and locked up several times. It also sometimes tangled with the Gracenote Web site. For example, if my CD wasn't recognized, it repeatedly displayed error messages and wouldn't let me close the window.

This one isn't a gripe, but potential buyers should remember that your computer must be on for Omnifi to work as a server. If you leave it on all the time anyway, that's fine - it would be inconvenient if you had to power up just to use the Omnifi. A more significant limitation, perhaps, is that the Omnifi can only connect to a stereo system via analog line outputs. I hope we see digital outputs in future models. Also, I'd have appreciated a way to stream RealAudio and uncompressed PCM files. One more thing: how about adding surround sound?

LP records were terrific. Given the primitive nature of the technology - a hard rock on a stick, and a groove cut into plastic - the LP achieved truly remarkable results. But that was then. The Omnifi hardware and SimpleCenter software is now. Welcome to the world of hard-disk music archives, streaming Internet radio stations, online information databases, media management, and even wireless communication and distribution. That's pretty intoxicating stuff, and the Omnifi is an exciting example of where we're going.

Omnifi, Division of Rockford Corp., Dept. S&V, 546 S. Rockford Dr., Tempe, AZ 85281; www.omnifimedia.com; 480-967-3565