OTHER TECH

Whole-house entertainment means never having to handle physical media. With all your music, photos, and videos parked on a hard drive and accessible through your home network, you can enjoy them in any room where a media receiver is attached to a TV or stereo system. To find out just how easy - or difficult - a media receiver can be to set up and use, we tested the Netgear MP101 ($149), which delivers only music; the Pinnacle ShowCenter ($299), which also handles photos and video; and the Apex AD-8000N ($199), which does all that and plays DVDs, too. All three are PC-only. For more about media receivers and a comprehensive buyer's guide that includes Mac-compatible models, see Media Receivers in "Let Your Network Entertain You."

Netgear MP101 It might be the size and shape of an unabridged dictionary, but Netgear's MP101 Wireless Digital Music Player doesn't aim to be complete. It handles only one digital medium - compressed audio - but it handles it very well. The MP101 streams MP3 or Windows Media Audio (WMA) files from your PC to any room in wireless range - it supports both the original 802.11b Wi-Fi standard and the faster 802.11g. Or you can use its Ethernet port to connect it to a hard-wired network.

The MP101 is compatible with playlists created in popular PC media players. If you subscribe to Real Networks' Rhapsody to stream music on your computer, you can listen to it on the MP101, too. And to get you started, Netgear throws in a 30-day free trial of Rhapsody. After that it's $9.95 a month.

Setting up the MP101 is pretty straightforward. If you already have a home network in place, you install two Windows programs on your PC - a software media server to deliver songs to the Netgear receiver and the Rhapsody "client" to stream Internet music. Then you power up the MP101 and enter any necessary security codes for your wireless network. For a wired Ethernet network, you plug in the supplied cable - there's no configuration to be done. Finally, unless you intend to do all your listening using headphones, you connect the MP101's stereo line-level outputs to your music system or powered speakers.

Once set up with my Wi-Fi network, the MP101 was a delight to use. Since it shares its playlists with whatever software jukebox you use, you don't need to mess with Netgear's media server software to create new lists to manage your music. The handy 6-inch remote has Playlist, Genre, Artist, Track, and Net buttons that make it easy to select music, plus shuffle and repeat buttons. You can adjust volume at the headphone output from the remote. The sound quality from both the headphone jack and the RCA jacks was entirely satisfactory, especially when the source WMA and MP3 files were encoded at a healthy bit rate - 160 kilobits per second (kbps), or higher.

The MP101's front panel includes a cool, pale-blue LCD screen that's visible across the room. Full song titles scroll across it in large, clear lettering - which came in handy when I was listening to unfamiliar tunes by Norah Jones or the White Stripes on Rhapsody.

For my tests, I separated the MP101 from its wireless network access point by three stories in an old brick house, and it still switched media without a hitch. There was some lag time changing tracks, because the MP101 had to sync up with the software server on the PC, but for $149 I could live with that. - M.L.