Squeezebox: Therapy for Digital Music

Here's my hot tech tip for a hot summer: Flee the blistering outdoors and chill inside with my latest audio crush, the Squeezebox, a way-slick Internet audio gadget from Slim Devices ($299).

We've all flirted with the Web content thing before: Jimmy Cliff live, or whatever you stole -- excuse me, legally obtained -- off the Internet, piped in from your Dell (DELL Quote), Hewlett-Packard (HPQ Quote) or Apple (AAPL Quote) computers.

Sure, the stuff had that Fisher-Price MP3-player feel: bad, cramped sound. But what could you do? Traditional home-entertainment systems from the usual suspects such as Sony (SNE Quote) and Toshiba just could not deal with PC content.

Yes, you could bridge the PC to your stereo with cables, wireless routers and lots of software, but that required at least a brown belt in gadget jujitsu. I, for one, could not be bothered.

Enter the Squeezebox, the elegant solution for getting Web content to your best-quality home audio system.

Squeezebox installs right into your home computer network: It plugs into the router that comes with your broadband Internet connection, and then it installs software that lets the Squeezebox see the music on your PC. The unit then takes that music, turns it into a normal audio signal your home sound system can understand and sends it out through the regular inputs on your stereo.

Voila, all the music hitherto locked on your computer now can flow seamlessly onto your audio system -- a very neat, and timely, trick.

The Future of Music

Right off, there's lots to like about the Squeezebox. First of all, it looks flat-out fabulous, done in a deep black or metallic finish and about the size of a decent slice of Romano.