Digital Trends

Nitro Pro Music Server

August 25th, 2004 | by Jeff Fila

Audio Quality

The big question that any audiophile may have is “how does it sound?” We tested the AudioRequest Nitro Pro using both analog and digital connections to two different digital receivers and the sound was excellent. At 320kbps, there was just no difference between an MP3 and the same song played directly from a CD. And at bitrates of 192kbps and up it was hard for most listeners to tell a difference. This is on par with what we expected.

Song transitions featured a short gap just like with a CD player. Some users may want a mixing transition and we'd like to see ReQuest implement that into future releases. Every once in a while we noticed a slight hiccup when changing from the middle of one song to another song. This did not happen all of the time and was nothing like the long pause or chopped off introduction that occurred with the Apple AirPort Express. Though it was of little consequence, it was something that we noticed a few times.

Advanced Features

We mentioned in the last section that the Nitro Pro can stream music over the internet. This is useful if you wish to listen to your music collection at work or a remote location with high-speed internet access. The system takes advantage of the flexibility of the internet, allowing owners to mirror their music between a “master” AudioReQuest unit and its “zone” units anywhere on their own network or on the internet.

Nitro's web server allows for configuration, playlist management and even streaming of your music.

The system also includes a “screensaver” feature that presents a slideshow of digital images on your screen when invoked. ReQuest includes a number of pre-loaded images and you can upload your own images to the server as well. Unfortunately, the screensaver only comes on after a user-definable period of inactivity while you are listening to music and can not be manually started. This seems like the next logical step, especially since many lower-end networked media devices offer some kind of image playback, and we were told that such a feature is currently in the works.

Because the Nitro is based on fairly standard PC hardware, it is easily updated and the company provides free firmware upgrades via the internet or CDs.

What's not to Like?

We were hard-pressed to find anything about the AudioRequest Nitro that we didn't like. Everything works as it should, looks good, and sounds great. Besides our hope for a way to view images in a slideshow, there are very few suggestions we'd offer to improve the Nitro.

We mentioned to the company that the “queue” option could be improved and they said they are investigating an update. At present, when you “queue” a song it adds it to the end of the current queue. Other applications such as Winamp and Apple's iTunes provide a function that allows you to queue a specific song to be the next song played. ReQuest will hopefully soon support such a feature.

Deleting songs, albums, and artists is not exactly easy to accomplish with the Nitro. This may be a good thing in the sense that you won't accidentally delete music, but sometimes you may want to get rid of some songs, albums, or artists, for instance to add a higher quality recording. The Java Remote appears to give the option to delete music, but each time we tried, the deleted information came back. This feature does, however, work as intended with the infrared remote.

We'd also like to see ReQuest offer a computer-based backup solution. If you spend 40 or more hours encoding your CD collection, you'll want to ensure that the data is backed up incase of a hard drive failure on the Nitro. ReQuest's system now only automatically mirrors the Nitro's data on other “Zone” units. An application that does this on networked computers would be a welcome update.

Our only other complaint was a matter of aesthetics. As many other consumer electronics and computers have lately, the Nitro Pro features a bright blue LED for the power indicator. We found the LED to be too bright and distracting most of the time. It can partially light up a room when it is dark and can be annoying if the unit is sitting in close proximity to the TV.