Accessories

With commercial 4K content still conspicuous by its absence, a solution for UHD TV owners is to make their own. Photographers have long been capturing images in excess of eight megapixels, but the Panasonic GH4 is the first Micro Four Thirds system camera to offer 4K shooting modes.

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.

AV enthusiasts have long argued the merits of interconnects, debating the pros and cons of construction and the relative benefits different cables bring to sound and vision. But when streaming from networked devices and across the ‘net itself, the very nature of what constitutes AV cabling is thrown into the air. When Wi-Fi and Ethernet are the required delivery systems, black art babbling gives way to more practical concerns.

As well as multiple ranges of conventional passive speakers, Q Acoustics has been involved in making self-contained speaker solutions for most of the time it has been in business since 2006. The new M20 is the replacement for the long-running (but excellent) BT3, which launched in 2014, and takes its place below the more recent, and more sophisticated, Active 200 that we looked at in HCC #319.

If you've been put off buying a NAS (Network Attached Storage) device, the HS-251 from QNAP might change your mind. It's capable of the stuff a typical modern NAS can do  – acting as a repository for all of your files (among them movies, TV programmes and music) that can be accessed by every networked gadget in your home – but it goes further. The appearance suggests this; the HS-251 looks more like AV equipment than something you'll tuck away out of sight.

It's hard to find an AVR these days that doesn't feature the Spotify music-on-demand platform. Yet it has its rivals, notably Deezer and, in the UK as of this year, Rdio.