New Toys

I just love listening to music in bed, right before going to sleep. You can close your eyes and focus, experiencing the music like a movie and less like the background noise music is often degraded to during the day. After moving my home office to a different floor, however, my bedroom is no longer close enough to my PC to do this (I used a rather quirky solution, using a game pad to remote-control WinAmp and later shut down my PC :D).

This put me on a quest for a replacement. Because I ripped my entire CD library as FLAC and stored it on my home server (running Gentoo Linux and serving the music files as a network share via Samba), I was looking for a player that supported FLAC and, ideally, would play music from a standard network share. This is what I ultimately decided on:

Logitech Squeezebox, a black rectangular box with speakers on both sides and a green display in the middle

That’s a Logitech Squeezebox Boom.

I admit that I half expected this category of devices to not exist at all, because a “normal” person doesn’t have a home server or a PC that’s always on. And when I found something I expected some half baked showpiece hardware, but was yet again positively surprised. Read on for my personal review of this brilliant device!

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