Review: Pinnacle Soundbridge Homemusic media streaming device

If you’re feeling a touch of déjà vu looking at the Pinnacle Soundbridge Homemusic, then don’t worry; it’s entirely possible you’ve seen something very much like it within these very pages.

Pinnacle has licensed the Soundbridge music streaming technology from Roku, whose original Soundbridge M1000 we reviewed 18 months ago.

Pinnacle’s take on the product feels, in many ways a bit of a backwards step. It can still stream music from your PC and play internet radio wirelessly but the distinctive tubular design feels plasticky compared to the M1000 and the screen is an awful lot smaller.

Assuming you already have a wireless network connection, the Pinnacle Soundbridge Homemusic is fairly easy to set up. Switching it on for the first time, our test unit found our Wifi network straight away. We were prompted to enter our WEP wireless security key and, when the computer re-started, it connected instantly.

The Soundbridge is fairly versatile in terms of the music formats it will play back (WMA, AAC, mp3, WAV and AIFF) as well as which media server software it will work with. All media streaming devices require a media server of some kind to be running on your PC.

Firefly is the only one that comes with the device, but all the other supported server applications (Windows Media Connect, SlimServer and Rhapsody) are free to download from the web. In our tests we found the Soundbridge also worked well with Windows Media Connect.

While Pinnacle claims the Soundbridge works with iTunes (which is itself a media server), you’ll need to install the aforementioned Firefly in order to access your iTunes library and playlists. Even then it can’t stream copy-protected iTunes songs, such as those purchased from the iTunes online store.

Sound quality is good though, and the Soundbridge is relatively fast to start up and browse through albums and radio stations. It’s comparatively cheap too and the inclusion of an SD card slot for popping in a memory card full of tunes is also fairly useful.

The small screen and lack of network socket for the option of connecting to a wired network may put a lot of people off, however.

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