Review: Neodigits Helios X5000

The Helios X5000 is aimed at audiophiles; it has a solid aluminium chassis, gold-plated connectors and support for the Flac audio format, which lets you compress your CDs to save space with no loss of quality.

It's also designed to play back video, including HD, and can upscale material to 1080p via the HDMI port, or component video. DivX and WMV 9 files can be played back, and look excellent – but there's no support for protected material so you can't watch the WMV HD version of Terminator 2, for example. You can’t play H.264 either, which is a serious omission for a unit aimed at the HD market.

As well as playing material from DVD, there’s a USB port to which you can connect mass storage devices, including NTFS-formatted drives, and network connectivity is via 100Mbit Ethernet or WLan, though the latter isn't fast enough for HD playback.

Network setup is simple, with WPA and Wep supported, though entering a Wep key via the remote – which has decidedly spongy keys – isn’t much fun.

For network playback, you can use the supplied Neolink software or any other UPnP media server, like Twonkyvision or WizD; Neolink will pick up your web bookmarks and playlists.

You can even view some online TV; the NBC Mobile news looked surprisingly good upscaled on a 32in LCD TV, but other bookmarks didn't work, and we couldn't play the BBC news clips; in fact, the built-in web browser is a bit fiddly to use, and scroll around.

But for audio playback, this is certainly a good performer, with a great sound, especially using Flac files. Video worked well too, including Transport Streams from Freeview.

But for a box that claims to be for audiophiles, it's disappointing to miss out DVD Audio and Super Audio CD, along with multi-channel analogue outputs; the best you get is digital optical and co-ax, or analogue stereo.

There's no doubt this is a competent performer – but we think the lack of H.264 is a serious omission, as the format is set to appear in more and more places, and we'd like to see a better remote control, too.

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