Network Audio Players/Servers

Volumio's software was initially designed for the playback of music files, with support for streaming services and technologies added later. This heritage still shows in the Volumio app which excels at presenting your music collection. Cover imagery and artist photography are provided, making even metadata-poor collections look good. Be prepared to wait however, as indexing a NAS collection of 3000-plus albums took quite a while. It's user-friendly, once you get acquainted... Returning to the home screen, for example, is not achieved via Volumio's main sidebar menu but via a tap of a small icon on the bottom right of the screen. The out-of-the-box search function is good and delivers enriched results even though Volumio's revamped AI-powered search tool wasn't yet online during our testing. We expect even faster, slicker and more 'thoughtful' results from the final version!

As the Rivo runs the Premium version of Volumio it carries an extensive range of options. These are presented clearly, except on very large tablet screens, where the choice can be a bit overwhelming. There's a lot you can adjust, and at first it's easy to forget that you need to 'save' changes, not merely close the screen. Also note that in some cases the unit will need to reboot, which takes about ten seconds. You'll have to do this, for example, when changing from S/PDIF to USB outputs.