Cisco Equipment Deals

5 Comments

1. Swanky Kitty October 11th, 2009

   Overall: We have been lusting after friends in ceiling music systems for years and I’m ecstatic to have found a wireless solution. I have to say that I am very happy with my system and find the Rhapsody and iPod implementation very cool… I am a Rhapsody user and was very excited to see that all of my “My Rhapsody” artists, music, and playlists automatically show up on all of the components. I went to my PC and added more music to my Rhapsody playlists and was surprised that it showed up immediately on the controller. I plugged in my husband’s iPod and I could see everything on the iPod from the wireless controller. What was super cool is that I created a playlist that started with the iPod and added more music from Rhapsody and it was seamless – very cool.

   “Party Mode”: We had a dinner party and it was really fun watching our friends search Rhapsody for music on the controller and add stuff to the play list, although I was a little worried with the initial My Turn! madness (pulling the controler from each other) as they tried to one up each other on the latest in ‘cool’ music.

   My Setup: I connected the “Player” to our receiver in the living room which drives our home theater system but also drives our speakers outside. I connected the “Director” to some Klipsh speakers I already had in the Kid’s play room. It’s awesome to be able to sit outside now and control the music vs going inside to change the volume and / or DirecTV music channel. The synchronization is really cool but I am going to need to get at least 1 more unit to get good coverage in the house.

   Installation: The setup was pretty straight forward and worked with no problems, although I had to wait a little longer than expected while the software was installed. Once the software install was complete, it was pretty straight forward to configure my systems. The wizard walks you through configuring the components for your wireless network I just entered my settings once and the wizard automatically pushes those settings to the device and verifies that wireless is working properly. You just connect each one to your router and the wizard pushes the settings and verifies that the device is on the network. After the initial setup, you take the systems to the rooms you want and plug them in – no additional configuration needed.

   Using the System: I was able to figure out all of the basic capabilities without looking to the docs for help and later found a few additional cool tricks listed on the card that came with the controller. Although the wireless controller is touch screen, I find that most of the navigation that I do is using the scroll wheel (iPod Style with a center select) and that the main things I do with the touchscreen is search and play / stop music. The touchscreen works pretty well and noticed that it works really well when you use your fingernail vs your finger. The standard remote control was a very good touch and is working out great in the kids room (they don’t get to touch the wireless one) – we setup a few favorite play lists and radio stations for them to listed to. The PC music server also found all of my iTunes music that I have ripped.
   Rating: 4 / 5

2. Ted Kastelic October 11th, 2009

   I was very excited to get this product. Seemed like a great product at a very good price. I was one of the first to order it. I even ordered the new Linksys Dual N Band wireless router to make sure that my router worked with the components. Set up the router with small problems. Pretty straightforward (and this is my third wireless router setup).

   Then I tried to set up a Director. No luck after spending over 6 hours during the weekend. It would recognize while I was hardwired then wouldn’t recognize the network when operated wirelessly. Even right next to the router.

   Same with the controller. I called customer support and spent 9 hours of my time (and theirs) over two evenings trouble shooting. And we still couldn’t get it to work reliably. My opinion – this is a piece of crap and not yet ready for primetime. I’m looking for another solution – this one is not it at all. I sent them back.

   Rating: 1 / 5

3. Boston Guy October 11th, 2009

   Cisco Linksys Wireless Home Audio Premier Kit–Includes One Director with IR Remote, One Player with IR Remote, and One Controller

   Great sounding product that was a lot easier to setup that I would have expected. I received the package with the 3 components, stuck the CD in my computer, and it walked me through the few easy steps required for each component and I was up and running in 20 minutes. I was surprised to find that it found all of my music on my laptop right away, categorized them by album, genra, artist, etc. perfectly – complete with album art, and was able to access them without issue. Cool!

   I setup the Player in my living room, connected digitally to my Home Theater system, and found the sound to be outstanding. CD quality – as it should be given I was playing .wav files, but even the compressed files sounded exceptional.

   The Director is setup in my bedroom and despite being in a completely different part of the house from my wireless router, has no issues with connectivity. And while not up to par with my Home Theater, the sound (with the matching Linksys speakers) is above average for what you’d expect for the price. The screen is bright and beautiful and easy to see from across the room.

   The wireless controller found all of the “zones” I setup right away, also has a bright and beautiful display with big touchscreen buttons that are easy to click for my big fingers. It is intuitive to use and offers all of the playback features you could want.

   The biggest suprise, though, is the Rhapsody integration. Pretty much every song you could ever think of on tap, tons of channels, and all in CD quality. In fact, I was amazed at the quality of the streaming music – definitely comparible to my dedicated CD player.

   Given the sophistication of the product and the technology, I would have expected a few speedbumps along the way, but so far have found none. I am extremely happy with this system, and found it worth every penny. The flexibility, qualty, and ease of use are all exceptional, and access to Rhapsody is way better than I could have hoped for.

   Rating: 5 / 5

4. Todd S. Harris October 11th, 2009

   I never review products but wanted to pass along my thoughts on all of the Linksys home audio products. I recently purchased 2 sets of the Premier package for a 4 room house that I wanted to stream music throughout. I liked the idea of a Director so that I could plug in the linksys speakers for the 2 rooms without a stereo system and the Player in the 2 rooms with stereos in them already. The set up took about 10 hours for me to complete. This included about 2 hours on my own, 4 hours (all in one setting) with the Linksys rep logged into my computer configuring everything, another 1-2 hours on the phone again with Linksys, and another 2 hours on my own. But all that being said, I didn’t give this a 1* review because of the setup. The help was very good and eventually I got everything talking to each other as advertised. HOWEVER, after setup, I attempted to play a few albums from my collection. That’s when I realized that the ‘player’ software was absolutely unusable. Without going into painstaking details, rest assured this is NO ITUNES. Albums can’t be played in their entirety; only ONE SONG AT A TIME. This is from the Director’s screen, the Controllers screen (ps. controller wireless range is poor, maybe 1/3 of other wireless devices), or from your computer control software. There was no option for playing ‘entire album’ from the list of songs contrary to what the online manual states. And, when you select Genre, it gives you a selection of albums…. who remembers which Greatest Hits goes with which artist… should be programed to go Genre-ARTIST-Album-Song like in iTunes. Long story short, the concept is nice, and the package nice, but the functionality is very poor. I have since purchased 3 AirPort Express’, an Apple TV, 2 Bose sound systems, and an iTouch (to function as a remote when not in front of my computer or appleTV) to stream iTunes throughout my house perfectly. It actually COST LESS than all of the linksys products. Research and make your own decision. If you like iTunes then I strongly recommend staying away from Linksys… you and your party guests won’t have any idea how to play music.
   Rating: 1 / 5

5. Dussel October 12th, 2009

   I ordered this the day of the release and somehow received a previously opened box, someone at Amazon decided to check the system out and try and re-package it to look unopened. However it’s pretty obvious when the all the plastic sleeves that the remote and extenders were packed in had torn tape and wrinkles, cords not packed right, etc., not to mention the whole box being re-taped shut.

   On to the system. Well there were a lot of things to like about the concept of this system, however Cisco must have outsourced the implementation because it pretty much failed across the board.

   The touchscreen is inaccurate (yes I calibrated it) and unresponsive at times, though the QWERTY screen had nice size keys you have to type slow for it to register letters properly, and sometimes it would highlight the letter showing you pressed it, but the letter wouldn’t actually register in the text box. You cannot power down the remote besides removing the battery. The remote failed to find the other components even though they show up properly in the packaged EasyLink software. The remote showed 2/3 signal when 3 feet away from my Draft-N DB router, and 1/3 signal when roughly 25 feet away. Both the remote and extenders failed to access my shared music folders, and would return the message “System Busy” nearly instantly like it never even tried to connect.

   On to the extender with the display. Although Cisco claims that you can setup your system sans PC software, it completely failed to do so. The use of the side buttons to control the unit through the display is cumbersome and not well planned. Since they are universal you have to press one before the on-screen graphics are displayed to show you the action assigned to each button. When you do this, the system performs whatever function is assigned to it, so it may exit or skip, since you can’t see the assigned action until you press it first. The button graphics at times block the left 1/3 of the text box used for searching and to enter your network password. Therefore you are unable to change to the proper letter because you can’t see what your doing. The volume scroll pad around the power button is also poorly designed, you have to touch and leave your finger there for a second before you can scroll otherwise it doesn’t register the move. You also have to scroll really slow so it can keep up, oh and don’t accidentally press the power button while your doing it (the scroll pad is quite small). The backlight behind the power button is also really bright and annoying especially the orange when powered off at night. If they were smart they would have put the same scroll pad from the remote which also has up, down, left, right and center click, instead of the worthless power/volume setup.

   On the extender without a display, it makes no sense to ship a secondary remote with it that has anything besides power, play/pause, volume and prev/next. instead they ship a full remote identical to the secondary that comes with the displayed unit beside changing the color of the home button, it’s absolutely pointless beyond the simple controls I listed above since you can’t see what you’re doing. Unless they expect people to memorize the interface or something else ridiculous.

   Overall, after hours of wasted time all I got was some Rhapsody out of the one unit with the display, I hooked up some bookshelfs to it and it sounded good for what it is. The PC control interface was pleasing to the eyes, it displayed each zone and would show album art within each zones frame. It was also easy to link the extenders into party mode with 1 or 2 mouse clicks, however it does take 30 seconds or so for the units to sync to one-another. Otherwise the system as a whole was a great concept, but complete failure. The remote interface was simple and easy to navigate, but if Cisco can’t fix the touch interface and address its sluggishness via firmware, what good is it. Cisco stripped any sort of diagnostics or manual setup from both the extender/remote menus, as well as the PC software, so when their proprietary setup doesn’t work you have no work-around. I used their walk-through install (after manual attempts failed) which includes a self-diagnostic, and according to it all my components installed properly, well so it said. And yes I re-installed and tried again, I also checked that my firmware was up to date, still no inter-system com’s, nor access to my music.

   Well that was my experience, not too swift! For a $1,000 I expect a proper product that works as designed, not with the major failures and flaws. These days processing power is cheap enough that no new device with empty memory/storage should run so poorly, I can’t imagine it handling any sizable music collection without freezing. For this Cisco wasted enough of my time that I felt compelled to type my first product review.

   Please remember you mileage may vary, I hope for others sake that my hardware was in many ways defective.
   Rating: 1 / 5

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