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Philips WAS7500/05 Wireless Music Station with Internet Radio and Wireless Music Streaming
See it at Amazon.co.uk for £179.99Average Customer Rating
(4.0 out of 5)
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Most Helpful First | Newest First | + Share8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
ambivalent after a week
(3 out of 5) by Andy on Sep 5, 2009 (Oxfordshire, UK)philips was7500 (the s is for station)
sound: it sounds great to me!
appearance: it looks nice from the front. it is quite deep. i have hung it from the wall. including the thickness of the bracket the front face sits about 13cm from the wall. it looks OK in the middle of a short wall, but looks bad near the corner of the room on a long wall (as you can see behind it).
power: I like that it has a really low power standby state. not like many similar devices that have huge transformer plugs were you can just feel the energy being wasted as heat
HD (hard drive) function: this does nothing unless you own another philips product (eg the centre, wacs7500), as the station has no hard drive. the centre has a 80 Gigabytes hard drive to store music on, but is way more expensive. indeed if you consider the price difference between the was7500 and the wacs7500, you could buy around 3 Terabytes of storage for your existing computer for the same money. I don't see why anyone would buy a centre, which makes this option a waste of menu space
radio (FM and internet): The FM radio gets good reception. it scans for stations and assigns all to presets. It works nicely. The internet radio automaticly connects to a philips server through which you can get 4 internet radio providers: bluebeat, live365, radioio, vTuner. I have been able to find all the stations that I want and it works quite nicely. You have to use the philips website to set up favourites out of the enourmous list. the philips website is rather slow. you have to click through various trees to find stations, you can't just type in the name of a station to search. however, once this is set up it seems to work OK. It does make you rather reliant on the philips servers. in the week i have had the was7500, I have had an outage. the part of the philips site were you choose stations just went blank, not so much as a "back in 3 hours" message. they do seem to be developing this, though. when i first tried, I could get no live365 stations, because they required another login, now philips seemed to have added the facility to enter these credentials.
external USB: I was hoping this would work with my sony walkman, but it does not. I think because my walkman uses VFAT. I have bought a 16GB FAT32 memory stick to use with this feature (not tried it yet).
UPnP media server: this has been a real pain to set up, possibly becuase of the was7500, and possibly because of the other devices. i got it going eventually. they advise you turn off the firewall on your PC (if you want to use windows media player 11 as a media server). this is bad advice. i managed to set up some firewall rules (in AVG) to allow communication with the was7500.
auxilliary input: this does work with my walkman, which is great.
support: I submitted two questions via the philips website a week ago and have not had a reply. (I checked my spam folder)
music follows me: only works with other philips streamium stuff. sounds like a nice idea. i would not rule out buying another one in the future, though it will not be a "centre" and it will have to be better value than this one.
supplied software: WADM.exe. the manual a load of weird instructions for connecting your PC directly to the was7500 using a network cable. (should you wish to do this the trick is to set fixed IP for both where the first three numbers in the IP address are the same. the last should be different. then set the IP of the was7500 to be the default gateway on your computer. this is very poorly documented.) The good news is that I think it is also completely unnecessary. all that the WADM program does is bring up a browser that connects to the web admin server on the was7500! i think that for the wacs7500 it may do more substantial things. this also means that for the was7500 the WADM program is a complete waste of time. simply connect to your router to find out what the IP address of the was7500 is a visit its web admin address. this also means that it works fine with whatever operating system you want. it is not tied to microsoft, as philips say it is. via the web admin facility you can set info required to connect to the internet (for the radio) or your wireless key, or do a firmware upgrade (which i did straight away).
time and alarm: i bought this to replace an old radio alarm clock. i checked that it had an alarm first. it does take the time signal from an FM radio station of your choice. however, there are no screens where it actually tells you what the time is! Though the alarm does go off at the correct time. now i have to buy a clock too! No date has been set yet by OFCOM (at least 2015), but FM radio will be ending. So I wonder why they didn't enable this device to take a time signal from a NTP server.
After a week of using the device, i am ambivalent. After the pain of set up (made worse by the poor manual), I am slowly being won over by the convenience, good looks and sound.
sound: it sounds great to me!
appearance: it looks nice from the front. it is quite deep. i have hung it from the wall. including the thickness of the bracket the front face sits about 13cm from the wall. it looks OK in the middle of a short wall, but looks bad near the corner of the room on a long wall (as you can see behind it).
power: I like that it has a really low power standby state. not like many similar devices that have huge transformer plugs were you can just feel the energy being wasted as heat
HD (hard drive) function: this does nothing unless you own another philips product (eg the centre, wacs7500), as the station has no hard drive. the centre has a 80 Gigabytes hard drive to store music on, but is way more expensive. indeed if you consider the price difference between the was7500 and the wacs7500, you could buy around 3 Terabytes of storage for your existing computer for the same money. I don't see why anyone would buy a centre, which makes this option a waste of menu space
radio (FM and internet): The FM radio gets good reception. it scans for stations and assigns all to presets. It works nicely. The internet radio automaticly connects to a philips server through which you can get 4 internet radio providers: bluebeat, live365, radioio, vTuner. I have been able to find all the stations that I want and it works quite nicely. You have to use the philips website to set up favourites out of the enourmous list. the philips website is rather slow. you have to click through various trees to find stations, you can't just type in the name of a station to search. however, once this is set up it seems to work OK. It does make you rather reliant on the philips servers. in the week i have had the was7500, I have had an outage. the part of the philips site were you choose stations just went blank, not so much as a "back in 3 hours" message. they do seem to be developing this, though. when i first tried, I could get no live365 stations, because they required another login, now philips seemed to have added the facility to enter these credentials.
external USB: I was hoping this would work with my sony walkman, but it does not. I think because my walkman uses VFAT. I have bought a 16GB FAT32 memory stick to use with this feature (not tried it yet).
UPnP media server: this has been a real pain to set up, possibly becuase of the was7500, and possibly because of the other devices. i got it going eventually. they advise you turn off the firewall on your PC (if you want to use windows media player 11 as a media server). this is bad advice. i managed to set up some firewall rules (in AVG) to allow communication with the was7500.
auxilliary input: this does work with my walkman, which is great.
support: I submitted two questions via the philips website a week ago and have not had a reply. (I checked my spam folder)
music follows me: only works with other philips streamium stuff. sounds like a nice idea. i would not rule out buying another one in the future, though it will not be a "centre" and it will have to be better value than this one.
supplied software: WADM.exe. the manual a load of weird instructions for connecting your PC directly to the was7500 using a network cable. (should you wish to do this the trick is to set fixed IP for both where the first three numbers in the IP address are the same. the last should be different. then set the IP of the was7500 to be the default gateway on your computer. this is very poorly documented.) The good news is that I think it is also completely unnecessary. all that the WADM program does is bring up a browser that connects to the web admin server on the was7500! i think that for the wacs7500 it may do more substantial things. this also means that for the was7500 the WADM program is a complete waste of time. simply connect to your router to find out what the IP address of the was7500 is a visit its web admin address. this also means that it works fine with whatever operating system you want. it is not tied to microsoft, as philips say it is. via the web admin facility you can set info required to connect to the internet (for the radio) or your wireless key, or do a firmware upgrade (which i did straight away).
time and alarm: i bought this to replace an old radio alarm clock. i checked that it had an alarm first. it does take the time signal from an FM radio station of your choice. however, there are no screens where it actually tells you what the time is! Though the alarm does go off at the correct time. now i have to buy a clock too! No date has been set yet by OFCOM (at least 2015), but FM radio will be ending. So I wonder why they didn't enable this device to take a time signal from a NTP server.
After a week of using the device, i am ambivalent. After the pain of set up (made worse by the poor manual), I am slowly being won over by the convenience, good looks and sound.
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
In doubt the first hours but now delighted
(4 out of 5) by O. Einarsson on Jul 18, 2009 (UK)The setup was more difficult than I expected and compared to my previous Internet radio then this was a puzzle. From the box and within minutes I could listen to some Internet stations but not the ones I wanted to. I'm an IT person so I assumed I could do this one without any problem but I had to dig down in the manual and online forums before I could connect this the way I wanted. With the DNS and Gateway updated and Media sharing in my PC's then this is working very well.
Pros: Attractive with good sound compared to size, and grows on you quickly after all setup is done
Cons: Setup is more complex than other Interne Radio units I know and require online registration
Pros: Attractive with good sound compared to size, and grows on you quickly after all setup is done
Cons: Setup is more complex than other Interne Radio units I know and require online registration
9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
Difficult to use!
(1 out of 5) by Mr. C. J. Hall on Jul 11, 2009This is a great piece of kit on paper, but in reality almost impossible to set up. Took me nearly three weeks, lots of contact with Philips and lots of mates having a go! Still not working 100% but have given up now! Wouldn't recommend buying unless you're extremely technical or know someone who is.
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
Simply Stunning
(5 out of 5) by J. Renner on Jul 16, 2009 (London, UK)Hello,
I got this device now for almost 6 months and I must say it is absolutely superb. Setup was done within minutes. I only use a wired connection as the player is right above the network switch. So why bother with a wireless setup. The network features are very good. UPnP work like a dream with my Windows Computers. I hocked it up with a Windows Homer Server which contains all the music. Streaming works without any glitches. The WAS7500 also finds my old Freecom Storage Gateway which runs Twonky on it. Windows Vista and Windows 7 can be also used as streaming sources. Best feature whatsoever is the new Media Player in Windows 7 where you can use the "Play to" feature to feed music into the WAS7500! You can create very comfortably playlists on your PC and the Philips Player plays it! I also can stream music from my server via my Nokia N81 to the music Station... the Mobile Phone acts in this case as a wireless network remote control. That's cool.
Furthermore you can connect any USB device to it and it plays your music from there. I got a little Creative Zen which works very well with it. What else to say? Well Radio and Internet Radio is brilliant too. Sound quality is incredible (at least for my ears). Good enough for every little Party.
If you got a lot of music and you are interested in connecting lots of gadgets together it's definitely a new toy for you. And it plays music, too. If you are just looking for a radio, look somewhere else.
I can only recommend it!
I got this device now for almost 6 months and I must say it is absolutely superb. Setup was done within minutes. I only use a wired connection as the player is right above the network switch. So why bother with a wireless setup. The network features are very good. UPnP work like a dream with my Windows Computers. I hocked it up with a Windows Homer Server which contains all the music. Streaming works without any glitches. The WAS7500 also finds my old Freecom Storage Gateway which runs Twonky on it. Windows Vista and Windows 7 can be also used as streaming sources. Best feature whatsoever is the new Media Player in Windows 7 where you can use the "Play to" feature to feed music into the WAS7500! You can create very comfortably playlists on your PC and the Philips Player plays it! I also can stream music from my server via my Nokia N81 to the music Station... the Mobile Phone acts in this case as a wireless network remote control. That's cool.
Furthermore you can connect any USB device to it and it plays your music from there. I got a little Creative Zen which works very well with it. What else to say? Well Radio and Internet Radio is brilliant too. Sound quality is incredible (at least for my ears). Good enough for every little Party.
If you got a lot of music and you are interested in connecting lots of gadgets together it's definitely a new toy for you. And it plays music, too. If you are just looking for a radio, look somewhere else.
I can only recommend it!
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Good but not quite great!
(4 out of 5) by G. Howard on Oct 15, 2009This is a great piece of kit. Connects to my centre station well and produces very good quality sound. Internet radio is great when it connects but sometimes this takes some work even though I have a strong router signal. Sometimes I have to abort and then try to connect again which usually works. USB connection is great when I just wanna play a few tracks and don't wanna have to turn on the main system. Just copy from my laptop onto a USB stick and plug in. Only gripes are that to use the alarm the system can't be in low power mode it has to be in normal standby, and also it always turns on at volume 10 regardless of what it was turned off at. This is not good when it's late at night and others in the house might be sleeping! Philips should do a firmware/software updtae to rectify these two things and then it would be perfect and 5 stars.