Black Boxes: Kenwood Sovereign Entré Home Entertainment Hub
CONTACT: (800) KENWOOD
WEB SITE: www.kenwoodusa.com
PRICE: $1,800
If you ever wanted to listen to streaming audio or MP3s on your home stereo system or home theater without a computer, Kenwood suggests the Entré Home Entertainment Hub. Intended as an audio/video convergence device, this rather pricey unit plays best with other Kenwood Sovereign products, namely, its Sovereign A/V receivers and Sovereign DVD library changers. Without a DVD changer, it's relegated to being just an audio device.
Setting Up
The Entré feels rugged and substantial as it's lifted from the carton. The generously ventilated device even included a muffin fan in the back. We presume it's a precaution provided for those who stack their components instead of using racks.
The Connection and Setup guide suggests connecting the Entré between your existing receiver and your TV and using a tape loop on the main A/V receiver to handle the audio. However, since we had no Kenwood Sovereign DVD changer at our disposal, we failed to see the value of passing everything through the unit. Therefore, we connected the Entré directly to S-video and analog audio inputs on our test system, which consisted of an older Kenwood VR-309 receiver (that predates the Sovereign family of components), a Sony KV-27V10 television, and a KLH 5.1-channel speaker setup. The other parts of our test system (a VCR, a TiVo, a satellite receiver and an older single-play DVD player) were not impacted in this configuration.
After plugging in the unit, we waited a few seconds while the Entré boots. Once booted, though, the unit turned on instantaneously. The first time we used it, we went through the Quick Start, which examined things like what kind of Internet connection we had. Beware, dialup users: you must use an ISP that provides straight PPP. AOL, CompuServe and Netzero users need not apply. The unit suggested Earthlink for those ISP-impaired, and even provided a code for one free month of the service.
If you are fortunate enough to have broadband, the Entré is ready to serve you. You can either plug in a USB device, such as a DSL modem or cable modem, or, if you are using a HomePNA phone line network, just plug in the line and configure your IP address. If you're using Ethernet cables, though, you'll need an optional adapter, though we can't fathom why this wasn't the primary means of connecting the unit to a high-speed network.
The Entré's spec sheet also mentions the unit's multi-room capability via HomePNA. According to Kenwood, with optional Axcess Remote Audio Player modules, the Entré can feed up to four simultaneous audio streams from Internet radio or from tracks stored on the unit's 20GB hard drive.
The Interface
The Entré's remote allows you to change modes with a row of buttons, as opposed to a “home" screen. Buttons to jump directly to the Web and to e-mail are also present, however, the software we reviewed (v. 1.0.2.7) did not yet offer these features. The OpenGlobe button brought up a black screen with arrows, but nothing ever appeared to load into it. Perhaps it was getting something, but there were no progress indicators either on-screen or on the front-panel fluorescent dot-matrix display.
If the provided remote isn't to your liking, you can also control the Entré with Kenwood's Powertouch touchscreen remote. A rather confusing aspect of its interface is the use of the Guide button to get back to the original screen. A Go Back or Escape button would be far more intuitive.
Radio Free Entré
During the Quick Start procedure, we were prompted to provide our zip code. The Entré used this to decide which over-the-air radio stations we might receive. However, it based its decisions solely on the distance between us and the stations' transmitters. If we were within 75 miles of even the lowest-power station, the Entré put it on the list. This strategy also doesn't help much with clear-channel AM stations, which can reach very large sections of the United States at night.
However, even after determining the theoretical best stations for us, it demanded the use of a Sovereign receiver in order to tune quickly to a listed over-the-air radio station. Otherwise, the Entré just sat there quietly.
We attempted to stream one of the Internet radio channels listed on the Entre's radio screen. It provided a list of traditional radio stations that stream various formats, along with a generous slate of Radio Free Virgin stations. However, with a 28.8kbps connection, the Entré would not connect to anything. We couldn't test it with the broadband connection at our office, either, since it comes over an Ethernet connection -- like we said, this is the one connection the Entré doesn't have, and we didn't have the optional adapter.
CDs and MP3s
Inserting an audio CD alerted the Entré to connect us to the Internet to fetch CD track info. Entré uses Gracenote's CDDB to download track information, which subjects the data to the typos of other users. An annoying characteristic, but an acceptable tradeoff, considering the vast quantity of discs in their library.
The Entré also tries to retrieve cover images of its discs, but if there is no match in its library, it uses a generic placeholder image (i.e. “Country," “Rock," etc).
Since the Entré uses an off-the-shelf CD-RW drive (our review unit had a Lite-On LTR-12102C), we're skeptical as to whether it can read copy-protected CDs. Ironically, you can burn an audio CD with the Entré only with CD-Rs or CD-RWs for digital audio, so the unit has digital rights management in mind.
You can bring in MP3s (and WMAs, though we didn't have any tracks in that format to test on the unit) written on ISO-9660-formatted CDs. We tried to listen to some MP3s that were on a UDF-formatted CD-RW, but the unit simply gave up and said “No disc."
When we listened to CDs or MP3s, the extent of the information on-screen was the track number, the artist, the track title, the time into the track and the length of the track. If there ID3 tag has additional information, you can't get to it with the Entré.
Once we had some music on the Entré's hard drive, though, we could easily burn it onto CD. The menu for track selection was structured on albums, which made picking individual tracks a little confusing. The Repeat button selected the whole album, which sped things up dramatically. A provided disc-capacity indicator helped us fill our discs most efficiently.
The Entré offered two options for burning discs. If we wanted a CD that could play anywhere, we had to use the aforementioned CD-Rs or CD-RWs for digital audio. However, we could use regular data CD-Rs or CD-RWs if we were only burning MP3s.
When the CD tracks changed, the front-panel display updated itself and scrolled the name of the new track, which was a nice touch. However, when changing tracks by hand, there was a lag time, which caused confusion as were inclined to overshoot the track we wanted.
On the Line
If you're stuck with a dial-up connection to the Internet, beware that the Entré likes to be online. A lot. In fact, so much that anytime you put in a new audio CD or try to tune to an Internet radio station, it will connect itself to the Internet automatically, without asking permission. And the unit stays online without giving any indication as to its connection status. This could generate a lot of problems in households with a lot of phone traffic. Granted, if you connected to listen to Internet radio, this probably wouldn't be much of a problem. But we feel that the unit should be more polite and hang up the phone when it doesn't need to use it.
Tried to Love It
Perhaps the unit is just a little too ambitious. There are a few too many flaws to make it worth the $1,800 retail price. The unit certainly has potential, though, and it is definitely interesting. However, if you just want something to play MP3s, there are many other devices that can do that for a lot less.
Charles Fulton is an Associate Editor for Smart TV & Sound.
SMART SPECS
Frequency response: 20Hz-20kHz ±0.5dB
Total harmonic distortion: <0.003% at 1kHz
S/N ratio: 100dB
Channel separation: 95db at 1kHz
CD-RW drive: 32x read, 12x write, 10x rewrite
Dimensions: 17 5/16 w x 4 1/2 h x 11 1/2 d inches
Weight: 14.3 lbs.
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