D-Link WIRELESS MUSIC PLAYER 2.5 ( DSM-120 ) | List Price: $271.12
Discount Price: $149.95
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Brand: D-Link
Binding: Electronics
Features: - Formats Support: M3U/PLS/WAV/WMA/MP3
- Display: LCD - Easy-to-read
- Network: Fast Ethernet /Wireless IEEE 802.11b/g
- Interfaces/Ports: Headphone Jack - Rear/RJ-45 Network - Rear/RCA Stereo Audio Line-out - Rear/Toslink SPDIF Output - Rear/USB 1.1 - USB - Rear
- Standard Warranty: 1 Year(s)
Bad wireless, Bad screen, Bad remote, Bad keys, Bad deal. [Posted on 2006-09-20]
I really tried to like this one. On paper it satisfies all of my needs, internal HD that you supply, wireless streaming, USB host and controller interfaces, decent looking tabletop box. Wow, perfect, right?
Wrong.
In reality after two units I have given up. Neither would connect and acquire IP addresses to any of 3 different wireless routers. Wired it works fine, but the whole point was not to run another cat5 through my house to the stereo. What is the deal D-Link? Still using those garbage chipsets in the budget equipment that soiled your reputation over the last 5 years? Get with the program and spring another $5 and give us a real receiver!
Oh, by the way, the buttons are slower than death and the menu system is occasionally unresponsive. This is both old and new firmware revisions. No playlists supported for the internal drive so you are stuck navigating a huge directory structure, and slowly. Oh, and the screen is five lines high so 500 artist directories makes it futile. I could probably write the firmware in VBasic while blind and get it to work better.
All in all a total ripoff considering the failures.
Major Firmware update bug (Do not buy) [Posted on 2006-11-26]
(See other reviews on the internet for this product also, all complaining of the same problem).
Plug it in, unit will ask if you want to upgrade firmware (default is yes). Press Yes, and the unit will stop working permanently.
DO NOT BUY until manufacturer fixes this Major Bug. I selected this unit over the Roku, because I liked the ability to add a hard disk. The features in this unit are excellent, BUT it will automatically try to upgrade its firmware over the network, and this WILL RENDER THIS UNIT USELESS. You will not be able to reset or do anything with this unit except send it back. I tried 2 units, and had the same issue with both. Spoke with "product specialists" at DLink. They should simply take these units off the market instead of wasting the consumer's time and effort.
Search for 'dsm-120 firmware' on Google for other similar reviews of this unit.
Absolutely Horrible [Posted on 2006-12-31]
First, you'll never get this thing to work wirelessly, reliably. Even sitting in the same room as your wireless router. If it manages a connection, it will have more drop-outs than actual music.
If you hook it up with a network cable, it will work better. But there's still a massive problem. The navigation system is absolutely, incredibly, unbelieveably horrible. If you have more than 20 CDs worth of music on your computer, you'll never be able to navigate through it because the system is sooooo sloooooow. And ignorant.
Let's say you choose to look by artist. It'll give you four at a time. You then click the page down button and it'll slowly give you four more. Let's assume you have 200 artists. Well, that's a lot of clicking to get to the Rolling Stones or the Who! And if, just if, you actually get there then you get to the next problem. You won't be given a list of their albums. Just a giant list of their songs with no regards to which album they're from.
So, you might think of searching by album, instead of artist. Okay, let's say you have 500 albums. Do you really want to slowly click your way down that far, four at a time? Really, it'll take you fifteen minutes or so to get to the later albums. Then when you get there, it'll play the songs alphabetically. No, it won't look at the file name (in case you named with a number up front). Forget that. It'll look at the tag to get the song name and play alphabetically. Stupidly, it won't look at the same tags to get the proper order! The only way around this is to have playlists. But if you search by artist or album, you won't get that option.
Playlist searching is totally separate. If you have 1000 albums of material then you'll have to setup 1000 playlists. Then you'll have to page through them four at a time. Nope, you can't pick an artist and then see their playlists.
Avoid this thing. I don't know if I've ever been so disappointed and disgusted with a product. There's absolutely no way that they tested it with more than 20 albums. And I'd be highly surprised if they tested it with more than a couple of wireless routers.
Disappointing [Posted on 2008-06-04]
Thought this was exactly what I needed - mainly for the USB connection for my external hard drive, but also because I have a D-Link router which has worked flawlessly right out of the box.
The DSM-120 is a different story, however, and is on it's way back to TigerDirect as I type. It failed to recognize anything connected to the USB port, except a thumb drive which it would read and then lock up every other track, and then require a re-start. I thought it might be because I had not connected it to my network, so I tried that. Unfortunately it then proceeded to upgrade itself over the internet, and that was the end of that. Bricked! Buy at your own peril!
Who needs a DSM 120? [Posted on 2008-06-29]
The Unit I received probably works as designed, though not desired, which prompted the question: who needs the DSM 120?
First impression: it looks unnecessarily bulky. The menu and buttons are intuitive enough that I set up most of the stuff without even reading a manual. The wireless WEP works well. Sound quality is decent for me.
There are two major features: a file server and a music server. DSM-120 works better as a file server, but the music server part is limited. For an example, I would be happy if it can play MMS stream audio but it can't. I guess it's a selling point that the DSM 120 does not need a PC to play. However, it's a big problem when it can not use a PC to play *media that it can not play itself*. Also, the sound quality generated by the DSM-120 is doubtful.
The items works as to its specification, but now I realized it's a wrong idea, and is useless to me. It's my own fault of buying it without much thinking, but seriously, who will need this bulky file server that can't play many type of 'music'?
Update: now the wireless connection stopped working after a night, and I can't get it to work. I wish I could downgrade the rating to 1.
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