Digital Trends

Roku SoundBridge M2000 December 14th, 2004 | by Ian Bell

Features and Design

If you are like us, you are picky about how your home theater system looks and sounds. You have paid a lot of money to get a system that expresses your tastes, so when it comes to a streaming media device you want the same. We have reviewed a large number of media devices this year, some look like network routers while others look like mini-computers, but none of them have looked as good as the Roku SoundBridge. All we ask for is a product that looks like it belongs with our home theater. And while the SoundBridge doesn't look like another CD player, it is attractive enough that it fits the job — and it does it with minimalism.

Measuring 17-inches wide for the M2000, this networked player is the same width as your home theater components ensuring that it will fit in the same audio rack. The SoundBridge chassis is made up of a silver pipe-shaped body, a large text display and has two removable plastic end-caps. The end caps house the inputs you will use to connect the SoundBridge to your home theater. This includes an Ethernet port, a Compact Flash slot which you use for a Compact Flash WiFi card, RCA and digital optical outputs. Both the standard M2000 and M1000 players come with the 802.11b WiFi card, although the M1000 can be purchased without one for $50 dollars less.

A lot has been going on over at Roku lately. They just announced support for Real Network's Rhapsody service adding to their already extensive portfolio of partners. Natively the SoundBridge has support for Apple Rendezvous and iTunes, Windows Media Connect and Windows Media Player 10 (WMP 10), as well as any music service that uses Windows Media DRM 10 such as Napster, Music Match and Walmart.com. As of this review the SoundBridge does not support protected music through the iTunes service. This is a considerable disappointment, but Roku should not be at fault. We have yet to test a non-Apple based networked media player that has the appropriate licenses to play iTunes protected material. The SoundBridge can play many popular audio formats such as WMA, AAC, WAV, MP3 and AIF, as well as FLAC and Ogg depending on the software being used.

What makes the SoundBridge unique when compared to other networked media devices (not servers) is that the SoundBridge does its own decoding on the fly versus having to use your PC for the process. And because it comes with a 400MHz CPU and 16MB of RAM as a buffer, you can still use the computers on your network without worrying about any interruptions to the music being played.