I personally recommend this Pure Jongo A2 Wireless Hi-Fi Adapter, If like me you baulk at the idea of spending $400 upwards on mp3 streaming kit to your hi-fi, mp3 being the low-fi 21st century equivalent of a wavering transistor radio, then the Jongo A2 is the “cheapo-cheapo” solution. However, if you are running a Windows operating system older than 7, you will have to be patient, as the set-up process can get a bit convoluted.
Pure Jongo A2 Wireless Hi-Fi Adapter Review
With Wi-Fi and Bluetooth
I have two computers on my home network. One runs Windows 7, the other Vista (stop laughing…it works fine!). Linking the Jongo A2 to the network was very easy, via the free Android app for your phone or tablet. The FAQs on Pure’s site tell you how to set up Windows Media Player 12 (Windows 7 onwards) and 11 (Vista and previous) for media sharing, and the app picked up the W7 computer straight away, and the playlists all worked fine.
So far, so good.
However I noticed that the app was not seeing the Vista PC at all, and so after several bouts of Googling, and with the assistance of the very wonderful AV Forums (great for all sorts of techie problems) I did the following:
- Go to Administrative Tools->Services
- Change start up type to “Automatic” for HTML, SSID and UPnP At this stage I would advise that you keep notes of what you have done in case for some reason it causes problems I’m not aware of. I am not a computer expert, so don’t blame me!
After I had carried out the above the Pure app then recognised the Vista PC and the playlists were mostly visible (see Note 1 below).
Unfortunately none of the tracks would play, despite not being DRM protected and being 320 kpbs and below, both meaning they should work with the A2. Back to AV Forums, but no joy this time. After much faffing about it transpired that my ESET firewall was not allowing the files through to Jongo. This was resolved by putting it in “Learning” mode and…bingo!…it all works! Interestingly, the firewall on my W7 laptop
(Kaspersky) let it all through with no changes needed, which confirms my long held belief that ESET is the best computer security around, but that’s another story…
Hope all that helps!
Note 1 – an as yet unresolved glitch that may well be peculiar to my set up, the Vista playlists direct from wmp will only load up to “F” on the app. It may be that there is a built in restriction on the number of playlists that will load, as I have hundreds. I (or rather AV Forums) solved this by installing Asset Music DLNA on my vista PC, which Jongo now recognizes as a separate device to my Vista PC, and all the playlists appear in there, and in a far more user friendly layout. The layout of wmp music and playlists on the Pure app is not the easiest to navigate it has to be said.
Note 2 – as far as I know lossless files are not support by Jongo.
If you want to stream lossless you’ll have to buy a Sonos!
