1 November 2006 0:00 GMT / By Stuart Miles

While the idea of streaming your music from your PC to your hi-fi in another room isn't new, Logitech are hoping the addition of a remote control that will allow you to control your music more easily will make the offering more appealing.

The Logitech Wireless DJ Music System is made up of three elements. The transmitter that plugs via a USB socket into your PC, the receiver that connects to your hi-fi and then the linchpin of the set up, a Wireless DJ remote, which features a sleek iPod-like design with a blue-lit LCD.

Once connected to either iTunes, Windows Media Player, and MusicMatch Jukebox on the PC (it doesn’t work with Apple Macs at the moment) the display on the remote shows the entire audio content on the PC, as well as playlists, and also features a DJ List that lets people create playlists on the fly by queuing songs.

The system doesn’t require an existing Wi-Fi network. Instead, a transmitter is plugged into the PC’s USB port, while the Music Receiver/Dock is connected to the stereo system or to multimedia speakers and this was very straight forward in setting up, but it does require you to have your PC turned on.

The Wireless DJ Music System has a range of about 50 metres, and Add-On Receivers can be purchased to stream music to additional rooms.

After a fairly long set up where our PC had to recognise all the various wireless receivers, the software automatically zipped through our Windows Media Player and iTunes libraries and created a library to access. Rather than separate software that creates a separate library, the Wireless DJ Music System simply keeps track of changes in your main libraries, which is great.

Better still, if you've got internet radio stations saved as favourites in any of the programs you can select these to be streamed to your hi-fi as well.

In tests the Wi-Fi network worked and we had no problems controlling the system anywhere in our house.

The DJ on the fly feature works in a similar way to iTunes playlists and allows you to create lists of songs that you want to play together, however what we did find frustrating is that this playlist is only saved to the remote rather than being transferred back to the software application you are using.

Verdict

Although expensive - you can buy a 30GB ipod from Apple for £10 more - the wireless DJ Music System does offer a way to get your music from your PC to your hi-fi and control what's going on at the same time. If however you aren't fussed about controlling the tracks, there are considerably cheaper alternatives like the Oono Transmita 2.4G Wireless Audio Transmitter and Logitech's own wireless music transmitter for a fraction of the price.

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Review Recap

Made by

Logitech

Price as reviewed

£179.99

The good

Connects your PC to your home entertainment system via Wi-Fi

The bad

Need to have good Wi-Fi connectivity in your house, expensive

Quick verdict

Although a touch on the expensive side, the Wireless DJ lets you not only stream, but also control the music from your PC to your hi-fi wirelessly. Great Suff.

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