ONKYO NC-500 Net-Tune Audio Network Receiver

Rating:
Summary: Good small receiver, but beware significant defects
Review: The Onkyo NC-500 network receiver is suitable for a small bookshelf system in a den, bedroom or office. It is capable of receiving over-the-air AM and FM broadcast stations and provides a single auxiliary input for a CD player or other device. The receiver can stream audio files stored on your PC (using its downloadable Net-Tune software), and receive internet radio stations by way of its built-in Ethernet capability, and you can listen to internet radio without turning on your PC. While Onkyo recommends using this receiver over a wired network, I have had no problem with streaming audio and internet radio to it over an 802.11g wireless network.

Unfortunately, the receiver suffers from two problems which significantly impair its usefulness. First, it is only capable, at present, of receiving internet radio by way of Onkyo's server, which offers only a little over 500 stations to choose from.

Even if you know the URL of a favorite internet radio stream, you're basically out of luck. If this capability is something that's important to you, I'd recommend checking out the Philips Streamium devices instead. Philips offers a facility called "My Streams" which enables you to enter the URL's of stations you want to receive on their website and these will then be accessible to you through the Streamium device.

The second problem concerns the Net-Tune software which resides on your PC and streams audio files from it to the NC-500. After installing the software, you run it to create a database of the music files on your computer which can then be accessed from the NC-500. Tracks can be viewed on the NC-500's display screen by genre, artist, or album, based on the track tags in your MP3 files.

The main problem I have encountered in using this software is that files are entered into the database in something other than normal sort order. When I rip CD's onto my PC, I name the tracks from each album using the convention 01_track1, 02_track2, etc. in order to preserve the same order of play as on the CD. In spite of this, many tracks appear in the Net-Tune database out of order. For example, for my copy of Bach's Goldberg Variations, the tracks appear in the database in the order 1, 2, 3, 6, 5, 7, 4, 8, 9, 10...32 and, in case you're wondering, each track has the same number in its track tag as the number which begins its filename. I can't really explain why this is happening, but I definitely prefer to listen to this piece in the order that J.S. intended!

Once tracks are entered into the database, there appears to be no way to change their order. Tracks cannot be dragged from one position to another in the database list. Tracks can be deleted from the database and added to the end, but not inserted into the middle of it.

The only solution I have found for this problem is to create a playlist for each album in which I manually place the tracks in the correct order. There is no way I want to do this for a couple of thousand tracks, and you probably won't either. On the other hand, if you intend to use this receiver mainly to listen to one-track-per-song music and play order is not so important to you, then this might not bother you.

The playlist creation facility suffers from a clunky interface where you cannot select blocks of tracks to add to a playlist (by using shift-mouse click to highlight a number of contiguous tracks), but rather you must add them one at a time.

All in all, this is a good sounding, small receiver, but it suffers greatly because of problems which could be fixed relatively easily though Onkyo seems fairly unresponsive to these issues so far.