Usually AirPlay is a one-to-one relationship; you choose a speaker or receiver and broadcast to that device. But the unique thing about CasaTunes’ AirPlay implementation is that you can broadcast to multiple rooms/speakers at once. It also allows you to stream the entire music library stored on the XLi’s hard drive to wired or wireless zones. Of course, it opens up the huge world of music services that are supported by iOS devices. For instance, I loved being able to select my Living Room group and hear the perfect Songza playlist for dinner, or to broadcast from that app to whatever listening zone I happened to be in.
Oddly — and disappointingly — you can’t just connect a USB drive to the system and play music contained on it. It must first be scanned in, a process that requires a keyboard, mouse, and monitor. The XLi treats iPods like disc drives. The cool part of this is that it can pull multiple streams — up to five — from a single iPod. However, for an iPod to work, its “enable disc drive” feature must be turned on. It apparently wasn’t on the three iPods I tried, so none of them would work until I connected them to my PC and enabled the feature in iTunes. I could see how this might suck if guests come over who want to share some tunes.
Sonically, the XLi didn’t raise any quibbles, and it will play up to 192/24 high-rez FLAC or WAV files — provided that its AirPlay output is disabled. (I used a program to convert FLAC files to WAV format.) “When AirPlay output is enabled,” CasaTunes stated, “all music is converted to 44.1 kHz, 16-bit (CD quality) so that we can synchronize the hard-wired rooms with the wireless rooms.”
The CasaTunes XLi does a beautiful job of bridging the worlds of wired and wireless audio distribution. While I uncovered some niggling issues and quirks during my review period, my experience with the CasaTunes support staff indicated that they were really interested in making a great product and continuing to improve and develop the product line and push it forward.
At the end of any review, I ultimately ask myself two questions: 1) Did this product make my life more enjoyable?, and 2) Would I like to keep it in my system? With the XLi, the answer to both of those questions was a definite yes.
I purchased the CasaTunes XLi card and software in 2012 and built a PC specifically for it, and have been using it daily since. There are some real usability issues that Mr Sciacca didn't mention.
If you have a large library, browsing by list is not an efficient way to reach your music, and the CasaTunes (CT) Search function is deeply flawed.
Searching on ‘de la soul’ finds any artist/song/album with the letters 'd-e' OR ‘l-a’ OR ‘s-o-u-l’ in them. Quotation marks, brackets, and boolean operators (AND, NOT, -) have no effect.
Adding tracks on CT requires the user to trigger a full rescan, which slows the software, takes about 45 minutes (for my +/-90k tracks), and requires Windows Media Player or iTunes to be running on the server to provide the database.
Rebooting the hardware also requires a full rescan before any functions are available and you’ll know when it’s done scanning, because even if all rooms were off before the reboot, some may come back on.
The output from the XLi card controls volume in the various zones, which can be a problem with auto sensing amplifiers like the Niles SI-1230, because you’ll need to turn the volume up past 50% just to signal the amp, then down, which might shut off again.
The iOS and Android apps are notably different, which means I can adjust the room volume with the rocker on my Android while my wife needs to swipe the screen on her iPhone. She gets a slide show, but I can set the sleep timer, initial volume, balance, and tone.
Follow up on my comment:
On 3/11/13 CasaTunes updated the core software and addressed the search and library refresh issues, Giving both much faster and more user-friendly functionality.
The other annoyances remain, but there is hope for improvement in the near future.