TrustedReviews take a look at the Philips Streamium WACS700/05 wireless music system:

Philips' WACS700/05 music system is truly multi-room hi-fi for the wireless generation. It consists of a base station with a CD player and 40GB hard drive built in, plus a satellite unit, which receives and plays back music streamed wirelessly from the base station via built-in 802.11g adapters in each unit. In fact you can connect up to five satellite systems to the WACS700/05 base station and play different music simultaneously on each one - an impressive feat. Oh, and each unit has an FM tuner built in too.

Being able to play whatever music you like without having to hunt through hundreds of badly organized CDs has always been one of the great benefits of MP3 players. But this system takes the convenience to a whole new level. You don't even have to connect it up to an existing wireless network or PC for it to work properly – just drop in a CD into the slot on the top of the music centre, hit record and it will convert it to MP3 format for you. However, only 128Kbps and 160Kbps bit rates are available. The WACS700/05 has a copy of the Gracenote database stored locally, so it can apply track and artist names without having to connect to the Internet and this is upgradeable via connection with your PC.

The end result is a strange mish mash of the great and the distinctly average. On the one hand there's a boxy, closed-in boominess to music. On the other, the electrostatic speakers create moments of true clarity and excitement. Ben Folds' You To Thank, for example, kicks off with a real spring in its step with notes leaping out at you, but once the simple piano refrain gives way to complex chords and the tempo picks up, the sharp edges are rounded off, swamped by overbearing bass. The unit can't create an amazingly wide sound stage either, as the speakers are a mere hand span apart and can't be detached.

On the plus side the satellite system, while afflicted with similar foibles, doesn't do a bad job of imitating its base station big brother. In other words, there's not too much degradation in sound quality moving down from the bigger unit.