Part of me thinks that Philips is too scared to give its products proper names in case we’re disappointed with what they produce. It’s a bit of a shame really because the quite dry sounding Philips NP2900 is actually a very nice piece of kit.

What we’re looking at is an apparently well designed, well engineered £249 machine that’ll work over Wi-Fi to play streamed MP3s from your hard drive and all billions of internet radio stations too.

Better still, the NP, er, what was that number again, comes with a new Philips technology they call LivingSound which aims to expand the stereo sweet spot of the system with a series of precisely angled drivers within the four speakers and specially levelled internal amps. The plan is to broaden the soundscape as much as possible.

Naturally, it also comes with Philips FullSound tech too which aims to unruin the ruin caused by MP3 file compression at the slight expense of having to guess what the music is supposed to sound like. Perhaps not a technology for the purist but then nor are MP3s.

Available from May ’09 (this month)

Phillips

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