Equipment Review
Barix Instreamer / Exstreamer 100 Streaming System
Barix AG - Zurich, Switzerland
Both terrestrial radio and Part 15 stations alike have searched for a reliable solution for streaming audio. Many facilities settled on using PC hardware which may be prone to reliability issues while many others hoped to find a method of streaming that would allow some small improvement in audio quality than the typical streaming technologies provide.
Barix seems to have cornered the market in this area. Their Instreamer 100 and Exstreamer 100 units comprise a system allowing the ability to both send and receive streaming audio content without using a computer-based solution. We had attempted to contact Barix for several months to no avail until an inquiry to a promotional solicitation led us to Brenda Stadheim, the Vice President of Barix USA.
Brenda was quite helpful in helping us acquire an evaluation system for use in the product testing lab.
Opening The Boxes:The Instreamer 100 and Exstreamer 100 arrived in nice appearing retail packaging. Both units come supplied with standard "wall wart" power adapters and they Exstreamer 100 also comes with an 1/8-inch mini plug to RCA audio cable.
Getting Down to Business:Setting up both units are pretty simple. Connecting each unit to either your network, either by router or direct connection to your modem. Under default settings when the units are first powered on, the acquired IP address will be announced out the headphone jacks. This allows you to log into the web-based interface to customize the setup for your needs. This feature may be muted once the unit is configured.
The web interface allows you to configure a multitude of features ranging from network settings, audio encoding, security and more, depending if you're looking at the Instreamer or Exstreamer. Settings related help text accompanies the related settings for ease in configuration.
Most application benefit from setting both the Instreamer and Exstreamer to a fixed, or static IP address on your internal local area network (LAN). An excellent aid for those unfamiliar with their router hardware's port forwarding settings is the web site PortForward.com, a site that documents these configurations for a variety of router hardware.
Our shop tests consisted of setting up the encoder (Instreamer) and the decoder (Exstreamer) up on our own internal network to confirm that the units are in working order. After some simple configuration we were able to stream our test audio without incident. Something to note is that newer versions of the Instreamer are compatible with AAC+ streaming, which some believe allows a better trade off between network bandwidth, bitrate and overall fidelity.
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