The options for music streaming just keep on growing: we explain some of the most recent arrivals

The Gramophone Forum continues to be filled with discussions regarding methods of connecting the online Gramophone Player to existing hi-fi and home cinema components, which is why I’ve been spending a lot of time of late experimenting with different methods of bringing the two together.

You can read more about one of the simpler ways I’ve encountered elsewhere in these pages, where we have a review of the Musical Fidelity V-Link, designed to sit between a computer’s USB output and the digital input on a hi-fi system or AV receiver.

Whether with the Gramophone Player, BBC Radio 3’s “HD” stream – which, as we all know, is only higher definition than most normal internet-streamed radio, at 320kbps, and not at all high-definition when compared to, say, CDs – or music stored on a computer, the V-Link makes a serious difference to the sound.

What’s more, as noted in TW’s review, the Musical Fidelity seems to have the effect of making audio quality “computer agnostic”: in other words, it doesn’t matter what computer is “upstream of” the device: the sound quality will be just as good.

So it would be perfectly feasible to use a budget netbook computer – and you can buy those for as little as £150 these days – as a source for your music listening, streaming from websites, internet radio stations or even music stored on a network device. And with very little load on the computer – just a browser and wireless networking – it should run quietly and unobtrusively.

I’ve also been staring long and hard at my iPod and iPhone and trying to work out how to use those as more effective music streaming devices within the context of music stored on, or streamed to, a computer. The obvious route would be to use the portable device as a network client, but I know many find these players too small and too slow for such tasks, not to mention their limitations when it comes to running some kinds of website.

The answer could be found in software able to stream from a computer over a home network to one of these portable players, which could then be used in a speaker “dock”, or even connected to a hi-fi system. A bit like Apple’s AirPlay system, but in reverse.
Such applications have been around for a while and which you choose is as much a matter of personal preference as governed by your choice of computer, but I’ve had good results using Rogue Amoeba’s Airfoil software, available for both PCs and computers running Apple’s OSX. It costs around $25 (£20 once the VAT man’s had a snap at it), and is able to “hijack” any application – including web browsers – and stream its audio to a computer running either Airfoil Speaker software, or a similar free “app” (for all those iThings).

It works extremely well: within minutes of coughing up the cash (PayPal is dangerous in making these things so easy) I was able to stream both the Gramophone Player and BBC Radio 3 web audio to my iPodTouch, plugged into my NaimUniti using a USB cable. And very good it sounds, too.

However, there’s an even less expensive way of doing this, from neatly named Swiss software firm Clever & Son. WiFi2HiFi is an almost free iTunes “app” – 59p at the time of writing – which works together with a free software download, available for PC or Mac, to do much the same as Airfoil. With the two loaded you can broadcast from computer to iPod Touch, iPhone or iPad over the home wi-fi with very fine results, and the design of the software is so simple I doubt many people will have a problem using it.

For those wanting to dig deeper, there’s even software available to turn your main computer into an internet “radio station”, into which you can “tune” using a variety of streaming music client devices, some of which we’ve covered here in recent months. However, I suspect the complexities of setting up those are best left for a future issue.

Back to 'Listening Wirelessly'