What Hi-Fi? managing editor Becky Roberts charts the extended evolution of the music streamer, from primitive pre-Spotify players to modern-day multi-taskers
It’s easy – instinctive, even – to think that music streaming, something so instrumental in the world’s consumption of music today, kicked off when Spotify gained global traction around 15 years ago. Streaming certainly kicked on as, in its formative years, the pioneering green giant found its way into over 15 million homes through its free (around 75 per cent) and paying (the rest) users, as if Lionel Messi had given the technology his biggest welly. But wireless streaming in a home audio environment had in fact been around for some time by then, albeit in a form that is largely unfamiliar today.
The formative years
Hints of a forthcoming streaming revolution were writ large in the early noughties. As early as 2003, Roku had released its first SoundBridge music streamers; the miniature M1000 (see right) and larger M2000, capable of transmitting music stored on your computer, as well as internet radio, to a system in any room of your house that had a network connection. Direct playback from iTunes and Windows Media Connect was supported, as were online music services Rhapsody and Napster.
In a 2005 What Hi-Fi?Group Test of such fledgling wireless devices – headlined ‘MP3 your hi-fi’ (not today, thank you!) – we called the then-£180 (about £350 today) SoundBridge M1000 “a class-leading network player”. “Streaming internet radio is an exciting feature,” we said, “sound quality is excellent and we found little, if anything, to complain about.” The pricier Sonneteer Bard USB – a two-piece transmitter and receiver – was an early sign of a wireless world simplified.
In 2004, Apple released the AirPort Express wi-fi station, which could be used as an audio-streaming device thanks to its line-level and optical outputs and announced the debut of AirPlay (then ’AirTunes’). And by the time Spotify launched a few years later, Sonos had won three consecutive What Hi-Fi?Awards for its BU130 ‘Digital Music System’, with us labelling it “the hottest thing to hit hi-fi in years”. The Zone Player at the system’s core was an amplifier and wireless connector that plugged into a computer and pair of speakers to make up one full system, with the ability to beam music wirelessly to another (this time receiving-only) Zone Player in the bundle to make up a second
