Accessories

With Logitech recently announcing plans to offload its Harmony handset division, and most AV products now controllable via dedicated smartphone and tablet apps, you might think the last nail has been hammered into the universal remote coffin. One For All has other ideas, bringing its Simple 4 to market with a tempting £22 price tag.

You own one of the latest crop of BD players and you’ve noticed that as well as playing just about any video format you can think of, it can also act as a gateway to your audio collection, pulling files off networked hardware. The only problem is that it sounds a bit lacking. Can anything be done?

Netgear, better-known for its NAS boxes and routers, has for some time also been producing network devices of another type – media players. One of its stable is the NeoTV 550, which, thanks to its lack of Android, Boxee, etc, feels reassuringly traditional. It’s not out-dated, though – as well as networked content, the player gives you a choice of some online material, and the ability to feed media into it via USB or SD cards.

Take the internet TV capabilities of a recent Bravia flatscreen television and shove them into a little box (that’s operated with one of the coolest-looking handsets ever to grace a multimedia player) and you get Sony’s latest entry into this competitive field.

It may not be pretty, but Eminent’s EM7285 network media player is certainly advanced. Built around the Realtek RT1185 chipset, it’s compatible with a huge array of files and formats. The player ships sans hard drive, but one is easily loaded into the side if you want to store content locally; large files can be quickly moved onto it via a high-speed USB 3.0 connection. Rear-facing connections include HDMI and component with digital optical and coaxial audio outputs. There are also legacy phonos if you want to slum it. Gigabit Ethernet is the recommended network connection but there’s also integrated Wi-Fi.

If you want to pipe Full HD around your home, the pro way of doing it has been via HDMI over Ethernet, utilising paired network cables book-ended by an HDMI transmitter and receiver. But now a new, more versatile standard is finding its feet. Known as HDBaseT, it allows a single Ethernet cable (Cat5e upwards) to carry lossless HD video and audio, plus 100BT internet and control, over 100m without any signal problems.

Philips has taken time out from making feature-rich TVs to grab a slice of the growing music streamer market, bring some considerable design flair to the party. The Wi-Fi enabled NP3700 picks off tunes from devices on your network (or from ‘net radio services and Napster) and pumps them out of its built-in stereo speakers.