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I like to keep these things short, so.basically everything is great, except for:- no alarm clock- Blue-tooth feature is not very straight-forward, I had to RTFM to figure it out.I'd give it 5 stars if I could use the radio/CD player as an alarm clock :)
The only way to interface with this system externally is via Bluetooth. This is called a "component" system which leads me to believe it has jacks for adding additional components. It doesn't. This is a standalone system. Aesthetically, its a good looking system and the sound is good for a micro system.
This is a nice product, but I bought it for use with my iphone to stream music via bluetooth. Doesn't work. Researched it and it seems the iPhone is the problem, it doesn't have the proper/standard bluetooth protocol to stream the music (90% of cellphones with music capability do have this A2DP industry standard protocol).Not Sony's fault, but there is no fix for the iPhone and bluetooth will NOT work. Works fine docked.
That's it.USAGE & SOUNDAs I mentioned, this is used in my home office, across the room between my computer and the unit. I don't know. Now all I have to do is turn on the stereo and put it on Bluetooth mode, establish the Bluetooth connection from my computer, make sure the BT driver is the active audio output, and fire up WMP. The very first time you have to enter the default code of 0000 but it's seamless thereafter. I got this for my home office use streaming from my computer. Maybe some neighbor's BT devices were interfering. Perhaps the BT buffer was not loading and feeding the stream fast enough. But the good old WMP does, and that's what I am using most of the time.PECULIARITYIn the beginning, I experienced some funky speed up/down and pitch up/down while playing back via BT.
It was very annoying. It's worked very well at this volume. After a year and a half, I simply love this compact stereo and would recommend it at a heart beat.PAIRINGPairing is easy. It sounded like the song simply modulated to a different key. It's mostly background music with occasional blasting of kids music when they come in to play and dance to music. At $130, I'd say it's great sound for the money.APPLICATIONI might note that surprisingly iTunes does not support AVRCP which means you can't use the stereo remote to go to next song and back. Fortunately it went a way after a while without any intervention or rearrangement of electronics in the room. Regardless, I am happy that it's been working perfectly ever since.
While WiFi uses a fixed frequency channel in the 2.4 gig band, Bluetooth uses something called "frequency hopping spread-spectrum", which means it will walk all over the airspace of any other device that happens to be operating there simultaneously. While this is simple enough to do by right-clicking the CMTBX5BT in "My Bluetooth Places" on the desktop, then clicking "connect", the entire two-step setup procedure could easily confuse someone with limited computer experience. Bluetooth and WiFi were originally designed as competing technologies, and therefore don't "play well" together. Also, for a while I had a perplexing problem where the audio would drop out occasionally for several seconds at a time.
While the the sleek black cabinet looks cool, I'm a bit disappointed in the speakers; they're OK but not outstanding. Hopefully Bluetooth technology will catch up to it eventually.UPDATE: I'm revising my rating from three to four stars as I've managed to resolve most of the issues mentioned above, which were, again, not the fault of the CMTBX5T to begin with. Bluetooth technology uses the same 2.4 gHz frequency band as your wireless LAN adapter, and interference between the two is almost guaranteed (do a Google search on "wifi bluetooth interference" to see how widespread the problem is). In some cases, depending on what software you use to play music, you may need to reconfigure the default playback device to accomplish this -- another possible point of confusion for the technically-challenged.However, the fun is just beginning if you happen to be using your laptop computer on an 802.11b/g WiFi connection. Once you've paired it -- which involves setting a pin code on both devices, a not entirely intuitive process -- you must then CONNECT it.
As an experiment, I disconnected the base unit and moved it to within a couple of feet of the computer using a long ethernet cable. While this helped performance considerably, it would still stop momentarily to rebuffer every few minutes or so.As I mentioned at the outset, this is really not the fault of this product specifically, and until the issue of Bluetooth-802.11 coexistence is fully resolved, hassle-free B/T implementation is ahead of its time.Having said all that, if you are NOT wanting to use wireless internet and B/T together, this is a nice little system. It was simply unlistenable. In many cases, depending on the distance from your machine to the wireless hub, Bluetooth will slow your network throughput to a crawl, if not kill it completely. There have been some proposals for technical solutions to mitigate this problem (and some newer B/T adapters are advertised as being "802.11-friendly") but nevertheless, the chances are good that you will encounter difficulty if you try to use this device and your WiFi connection together.In my case, my WiFi base unit is in another room, a total of perhaps 25 feet from the laptop, and normal download speed from the internet via my cable modem is in the 3-4 mB/sec range.
The effect of this was that the media player (Winamp) would constantly stop to buffer, play a second or two of audio, stop to rebuffer, etc. This is a nice little system for the price but it does have some drawbacks, mostly due to its Bluetooth implementation -- which in fairness I should say is not all Sony's fault.First of all, you must pair the receiver with whatever other B/T device you're going to be using with it; it is bidirectional, meaning it can transmit the audio it's playing to a set of Bluetooth stereo headphones (Motorokr S9, for example) or can receive audio from a music player such as an MP3-enabled cell phone, or (in my case) my laptop PC with a Bluetooth USB adapter. If I switch off the WiFi, I'm able to pull up mp3 tracks from my local hard drive and play them wirelessly through it with no problem, and of course the FM tuner and CD player work great. Although the system lacks a changer, I can burn up to 10 hours worth of mp3's on a single disk for more than adequate long-play capability.
I hooked the system up to some Radio Shack bookshelf speakers left over from an old dead stereo from another era, and there was a very noticeable improvement in the sound quality. But for the price, this compact little stereo is hard to beat. After noticing that these signal interruptions seemed to be occurring with regularity, I timed them to find they were happening exactly ten minutes apart.
Also, once it's paired and connected, you play music on the laptop to the Bluetooth device, which appears to the computer as a set of headphones. This discovery prompted a close inspection of my computer's Bluetooth configuration, which revealed a setting to have it automatically scan for the presence of other Bluetooth devices every ten minutes. As soon as I started sending Bluetooth audio from a streaming internet station to the Sony CMTBX5BT, however, this immediately plummeted down to under 100kB, and continued to deteriorate until it virtually stopped altogether.
etc. Physically relocating my WiFi base unit to provide a stronger signal to the laptop has for the most part eliminated the interference problem, although I have noticed that during times of intense internet activity (downloading a large file, for example) the Bluetooth audio will sometimes speed up or slow down slightly. After disabling this auto-scan, the problem disappeared.Overall, a very capable and good-sounding system.
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