It’s a fair bet that in twenty years’ time we’ll look back and realise that, even by 2007, we’d hardly got the measure of the audio possibilities offered by music servers and the internet. Yet, we’re more clued-up today then we were, say, five years ago and hardware manufacturers are starting to capitalise on it in mutually useful ways.

Take the Fireball SE500i as a case in point. Escient calls it a ‘Music Manager’, which is not a bad description as it keeps copies of your CDs and, more importantly, keeps tabs on them, too. It also gives access to internet radio stations. It doesn’t, however, allow you to download MP3 files from websites, although you can hook it up to your computer and copy over files downloaded on the latter.

Keeping all your CDs in one place is not by any means a new concept. CD changers did the job a decade ago and since servers took over about five years ago, they’ve been getting bigger, better and more able to cope with large collections. The hard drive in this model is 500GB in size, which would work out at about 800 hours of audio in the CD format, but since Escient has built in FLAC encoding (the L stands for ‘Lossless’) there’s more like 1,500 hours on offer, which will handle most collections. Of course, MP3 is available for even greater capacity, but we’ll not dwell on that.

Internet radio capability

Internet radio is a bit more of a novelty and many folk will already have experimented with it via a home computer. What we really like about the Fireball, though, is the ease with which it accesses such services. Slightly nervously, we plugged in the unit, connected a TV borrowed from a neighbour (when Escient made this device entirely dependent on an external video display, they forgot that some people prefer to live without TV!) and connected the Ethernet cable to a BT Home Hub – most broadband modems connected to most ISPs should work perfectly well. About four clicks on the remote control later and the Fireball was registering itself with the server and downloading a list of radio stations, making it absolutely no more of a headache to set up than a DAB tuner.