Review: Cobblestone - streaming music with style

By Brian Clegg

These days I stream most of the music I listen to, which leaves me with a bit of a quandary. I can listen to music on my computer or TV soundbar with reasonable quality, or my phone or Echo speakers with so-so quality. But I have a perfectly good old hi-fi system with really rather nice Monitor Audio speakers that sits there doing very little.

I used to use an Apple Airport Express, and then a Neet Airstream, which joined my network and allowed me to play music from iTunes on my computer to the device – but the Airstream has given up the ghost, and it was always a restrictive way of operating.

Now, though, I’ve picked up a Cobblestone and couldn’t be happier.

It’s a rather elegant device, shaped and textured like a flat pebble. In principle it’s very similar to the Airstream – it connects to the Aux In of my hi-fi and music gets to it via wi-fi. (There’s a lot of -fi around.) However it’s much clever in its support of the technology. I can play direct from within Spotify, or I can use Airplay to play from pretty much any music source on my phone, tablet or computer – I tried it with both the Apple Music app/iTunes and Primephonic and they all worked fine. It simply does the job, very neatly.

As a nice little extra, the box has track/play-pause/forward a track sensors on the front (rather faint, though they light up if you touch them) so you can do simple play control from it directly, though more often than not I imagine I would do the controlling from my phone.

It’s simple, not highly expensive (around £39) for something that brings back to use a significantly more expensive piece of kit and does the job well. What’s not to like?

Cobblestone is available from Amazon.co.uk

Now Appearing is the blog of science writer Brian Clegg (www.brianclegg.net), author of Inflight Science, Before the Big Bang and The God Effect.