Clearly, the device does work well for most users. I can only wish it had done so for me, as it's a slick way to play your digital music library at excellent living-room quality.

PLUS

• Sleek remote control with colour LCD
• Supports a wide variety of audio formats
• Streams audio directly from the Internet

MINUS

• Difficulty connecting to a wireless network
• Slow indexing of music tracks
• Minimal support for network storage servers

The Squeezebox Duet from Logitech, serves a simple but necessary function: playing music from a central file server or from the Internet, through your living room audio system.

It's a sexy little gadget, too, consisting of a small piano-black box that connects to your audio receiver, and an elegant rectangular remote with a colour LCD screen. And it sounds absolutely wonderful... once you've got it working. Unfortunately, that took a bit of doing for me.

Hookup is easy enough: attach the tiny power brick and plug the player box into your receiver, via RCA left/right, digital optical or digital coax. (You can use multiple boxes and select between them using the remote. However, each will need to connect to its own amp.)

Next, drop the controller in its cradle to charge it up. A nice touch: the LCD shows an analog clock face during charging, making it both decorative and useful.

Once charged, the handset prompts you through the rest of the setup. It offers a list of detected networks, plus the choice of entering SSID and password. These were easily input one character at a time using the remote's iPod-like wheel control.

To access your music, you need to run Logitech's SqueezeCenter software on a computer. (It's available for Windows, Mac OS X or Linux.) You then specify a music folder, and the software indexes all the music tracks.

In Windows, SqueezeCenter presents the inevitable Tray icon. For detailed control, it opens in your Web browser. Unfortunately, on mine it constantly reported security errors, even after all my security was disabled. It did work, but I had to click on a cryptic address link to get each of the numerous Settings pages to load.

Support for various music storage schemes is a bit limited. You can specify only a single folder for your library, although the documentation suggests you can drop shortcuts to other folders into the main one, and have them all indexed together.

Support for network-attached storage (NAS) drives is almost entirely lacking, even for drives that include their own UpnP (Universal Plug and Play) media-server software, and shouldn't need an extra program such as SqueezeCenter. That included the Maxtor Shared Storage II, to which I'm gradually copying my CD library. There is a version of SqueezeCenter that can be installed on Netgear ReadyNAS drives, but no support for other makes.