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Sign Up Now: In his Fast Forward weekly e-letter, Personal tech editor Rob Pegoraro keeps you posted on the latest gear and gadgets (Delivered every Monday).
Consider the dilemma a digital-music fan can wander into: After you've copied every last CD to your computer and downloaded or bought hundreds of other songs to fill out the collection, you'll have a vast and wonderfully flexible jukebox at your disposal -- and one that will be hard-wired to speakers woefully inferior to the hardware elsewhere in your house.
So how do you get your music back into the stereo in the living room?
A year ago, Hewlett-Packard thought it had an answer in the form of a bulky set-top box called the Digital Entertainment Center. Its case concealed a hard drive to store your digital music, a CD burner to play and record discs, and networking and expansion ports to let you listen to that music on your computer and on portable players.
HP showed off a version of this device to me on a Thursday last May. A week later, the company, having completed its purchase of Compaq Computer, unceremoniously deleted the device from its post-merger product map.
Good call. The Digital Entertainment Center and comparable hardware from other companies suffered from two fundamental defects: Everybody's digital-music collection already resides on a computer, making a second hard drive in the living room redundant, and these devices' computer-grade components pushed their prices to $1,000 and up.
HP is now making another stab at reconnecting digital music with living-room stereos, and this time it's got the basics right. The details are a bit of a mess, but technological progress is sometimes like that.
Its new $300 Digital Media Receiver ew5000 uses an industry-standard WiFi wireless connection to stream music and photos on your PC to your stereo, provided it's less than 150 feet away.
This is how this sort of thing has to be done: People don't want to rip their CDs all over again, and they don't want new wires coursing through their house. (If the latter description does not apply to you, a $200 version of the HP receiver uses Ethernet cable to connect to your computer.)
If you know a little about WiFi, the ew5000 should be no trouble to add to an existing network. If you're new to this, you're going to hit the manual repeatedly, as the receiver's setup screen casually tosses around networking jargon.
The receiver also requires that you install a small server program on your computer (Windows Millennium Edition or XP only) to stream audio and image files to the receiver.
