stream magic 6 issues

[admin_exported]

been using my StreamMagic 6 for a couple of months now and it sounds great.

However, the thing keeps crashing and restting itself which is really annoying. its done this since day one and i had presumed that this is normal and that its resetting because its unable to keep up with communications between devices (NAS and USB flash affected) as i change tracks/album. therefore it resets and restarts (detects LAN e.t.c) which means i have to wait for the boot up then navigate my music to resume listening.

does anyone else have this issue? i would appreciate if any stream magic owners could let me know their experiences, ven if its just confirming they havent had this problem!

cheers

 

[Anonymous]

Here is a copy of a complaint letter I recently wrote to CA detailing the problems I've had with the Stream Magic 6.

I'm so dissapointed. I feel that perhaps I should have saved up and bought the NAIM system instead.

Hello

I've owned a Stream Magic 6 and 651A for a little over 4 months now and wanted to complain about the incredibly frustrating experience I have had as a result.

To begin with, the difficulty in getting silver components through your distributor Richer Sounds. Then the delivery of a damaged amp and the weeks required to get a new one.

Since then the user experience has been nothing but frustrating and stressfull. For 3 months I wasn't able to use the Android app on my Nexus 7 tablet and the version for my Android phone was buggy, slow and frequently refused to work altogether.

When an app versions supporting Android 4.x finally arrived, I found it lacked the complete functionality of the Ipad version, including 3 key features, that being 'browse by cover art', the ability to create & edit playlists and the abilty to navigate through a song by scroll bar. Starting up the app still fails 3 out of 4 times.

When I do get the app to work, I have to deal with a player that frequently and randomly resets itself loosing queue lists that I have to contunally regenerate as I can't save them as playlists.

In addition the Idle mode causes no end of problems with loss of connection to network drives being an all too frequent occurance, requiring a full power down and restart of the player in order to solve the problem. This happens with different model NAS drives configured in different ways. There doen't appear to be any stable connection network connection, only directly plugged in USB drives function with any consistency.

Other frequent bugs, include the loss of Azur mode control of the amplifier and random queue list errors in playback and the inabailty to do an alphanumeric using the android app.

I spend more time trying to get the system to work than I do listening to music. I find I'd rather listen to my ipod than attempt to listen to my HiFi system knowing that it will just leave me feeling frustrated, angry and thoroughly duped by Cambridge Audio into believing you'd brought a stable product to market.

 

[SomersetGuy]

I too am concerned about the less-than-100% reliability of the player. More specifically, I have found that when using the app for the iPad, and playing tracks with two connected 128GB memory sticks (mostly FLAC files), a message "Connecting to Music" appears on the iPad, and the Stream Magic player restarts, and I have to navigate back through the menus on the iPad to play tracks again. Interestingly I don't think I've ever had the player restart itself when I have selected tracks using the CA remote (or buttons on the player), only when using the iPad app.

I contacted CA's support about this, and they replied that what I was experiencing is usually caused by a lag while the Stream Magic 6 requests information from the USB device. They also said that they were aware this is not always as seamless as they'd like and that they are looking at ways of holding the information so it isn't requested and recreated each time.

So make of this what you will. Personally, I am disappointed that this sort of thing is happening on a device of this price (£700). I had major and repeated functionality issues on the Squeezebox Touch (I bought two when they first came out); these were very unreliable most of the time, and so I returned them to the vendor with the reason that they were not fit for purpose and did not perform according to the manufacturer's description.

This issue will probably (hopefully!) be resolved with a future software update on the player and/or app, but CA will have to get its act together to convince the HiFi-buying public of this player's merits, particularly so in this soon-to-become-very-overcrowded marketplace for network audio streamers.