Product Description

Experience your music all around your home - sounding great and at your control, without wires. The Premier Kit is a great way to start your Linksys by Cisco wireless home audio system in any two areas of your home. It includes one director/wireless-N music player with IR remote control, one player/wireless-N music extender with IR remote control and one controller/wireless-N touchscreen remote.

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Product Details

• Brand: Linksys
• Model: KWHA700
• Dimensions: 9.13" h x 14.88" w x 14.00" l, 14.00 pounds

Features

• Streams music from your computer and the Internet to two rooms of your home
• Manage music playback in every room with included wireless touchscreen Controller
• Connects to your wired or wireless home network
• Supports playback of unprotected MP3, AAC, WMA, and WAV files
• Plays Internet radio stations

From the Manufacturer

Linksys by Cisco KWHA700 Wireless Home Audio Premier Kit

The Linksys by Cisco KWHA700 Premier Kit is the ultimate bundle for getting started with setting up wireless audio in multiple rooms. The kit includes one touchscreen DMWR1000 Controller, one DMC250 Director, one DMP100 Player, and two IR remotes.

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Linksys by Cisco Wireless Home Audio: Change the Way You Experience Music

Linksys by Cisco's family of wireless home audio products make it simple to send music throughout your home

Most wireless music technologies "clip" the audio signal
during playback to save bandwidth, but Linksys by Cisco gives you all your music Invite new music into your home, or let your own music out to play. Access millions of songs from Rhapsody and thousands of worldwide radio stations with RadioTime. Play from your iTunes libraries or any iPod (with optional dock, sold separately). Linksys by Cisco Wireless Home Audio makes it all possible. Wireless Home Audio is a totally new solution that lets you play and control music in every room in your home – all wirelessly. Send different music to different rooms, or the same songs throughout the house in precise synchronization. With your whole library and a world of music at your fingertips, you can set the mood for any occasion.

Easy to Set Up, Easy to Use

Create your own multi-room audio system and fill your home with music in minutes, without tearing up walls to string cables, without hiring expensive contractors. It works easily with your Wireless-N router, so you can put music in any room and control it around your house. Start with a standalone system or a portable unit, or combine them to have a customized solution for your home. You can even connect to your existing audio systems – because isn’t it time your digital music met your awesome sound system?

See It, Touch It, Hear It

Simply touch an icon on the Controller to access and control music throughout your entire house. Touch the screen of the Conductor to do the same thing. Or use the IR remote to navigate and select music. When you want to set up a playlist for a party – even different playlists for different rooms – just hop on your computer and use the PC application that’s included with your Wireless Home Audio software CD.

Quality You Can Hear, with no Bandwidth Compromises

Think you’ve heard wireless music? Think again. In wireless speakers and other audio streaming products, many of the highs and lows of an audio waveform are clipped, resulting in a sound that’s far from pristine. But Cisco applied its years of expertise in networking technology to develop an amazing audio signal processing technology that preserves the highs and lows of audio waveforms, resulting in fuller, richer sound. You’ll also have great synchronization with no echo effects, thanks to a process that ensures each Wireless Home Audio component receives and plays audio within five milliseconds. It’s music the way it was meant to be heard.

Build a Wireless Home Audio System That's Right for You

Linksys by Cisco has a wide array of wireless home audio products to fit any home. Start small with individual players and add on later, or go the distance with pre-bundled kits (each sold separately). Either way, it's as easy as it gets to fill your whole home with music.

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Linksys by Cisco Wireless Home Audio Kits Give You Everything You Need in One Box

Linksys by Cisco's series of wireless home audio kits (each sold separately) bundle everything you need for sending music throughout your home in one easy package.

	Linksys by Cisco KWHA700 Wireless Home Audio Premier Kit--Includes one touchscreen Controller, one Director, one Player, and two IR remotes. It's the ultimate bundle for getting started with setting up wireless audio in multiple rooms.
	Linksys by Cisco KWHA400 Wireless Home Audio Executive Kit--Includes one Director, one pair of Stereo Speakers, and one IR remote. Perfect for an office, dorm room, garage, or any other place where you need a simple way to bring music into the room.
	Linksys by Cisco KHWA600 Wireless Home Audio Trio Kit--Includes one touchscreen controller, two Players, and two IR remotes. Perfect when you just need a bridge between your digital music library and your existing audio equipment such as a home theater system.

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Individual Linksys by Cisco Products for Total Wireless Home Audio Customization

Build your own custom wireless audio system or add onto an existing one with these individual Linksys by Cisco players and accessories (each sold separately).

	Linksys by Cisco DMC250 Director / Wireless-N Music Player--The Director accesses the digital music libraries on your computer, on a networked hard drive, or from the Internet. It has a 50-watt integrated amplifier, so it efficiently delivers rich, full sound to tower speakers. You can even connect analog devices like turntables or cassette decks to it and share your LPs and tapes throughout your home. Includes an IR remote or get the Controller (sold separately) to access and control it from another part of the house.
	Linksys by Cisco DMP100 Player / Wireless-N Music Extender--The Player is the easiest way to bring your digital or Internet music to more rooms in your home. It’s designed to connect to an existing stereo or surround sound system. Connect it to your home theater receiver or a stereo system in another part of the house. Now everyone in your family can access the thousands of songs in your collection or millions of songs from the Internet. Includes an IR remote, or get the Controller (sold separately) to access and control it from another part of the house.
	Linksys by Cisco MCCI40 Docking Station for iPod--The Docking Station for iPod connects to the back of the Director, so you and your friends can share your favorite tunes or access podcasts or audiobooks over your entire Linksys by Cisco Wireless Home Audio system. It includes connector adapters for different types of Apple iPods. The optional Controller gives you complete control over your iPod from any part of the house allowing you to build additional playlists and create new party mixes. If you think that sounds like a great idea for a party, you may be right!
	Linksys by Cisco DMWR1000 Controller / Wireless-N Touchscreen Remote--The Controller is the one device that will change the way you interact with your music. Control your Wireless Home Audio devices from other rooms in your house. With just a few touches you can find songs and build playlists, adjust volume in every music zone and send different music to different rooms or the same songs to the entire house. Looking for a song? Touch the Rhapsody icon and conduct a search by the Artist’s name to see their catalog of work. Touch the RadioTime icon and find radio stations from around the world. The Controller sleeps when not in use to preserve its Lithium battery time and includes an AC charging cord with a mini-USB connector, so it’s ready whenever you are.
	Linksys by Cisco DMSPK50 Stereo Speaker Kit--Experience great sound wherever these high-performance stereo bookshelf speakers are placed. They’re optimized for excellent music reproduction. When paired with the Director, they’re a smart, elegant system for any room in the house.

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Other Great Linksys by Cisco Products to Work with Your Wireless Home Audio System

Linksys by Cisco Media Hubs (model #s NMH305, NMH405, and NMH410)--Access all your music files with a Linksys by Cisco Media Hub. Media Hubs are intelligent storage / server platforms designed to stream simultaneous streams of music or video. Models are available with hard drives and can store thousands of hours of video or hundreds of thousands of songs and digital photographs. Once on the home network, your Wireless Home Audio devices and the Controller will instantly discover a Linksys by Cisco Media Hub.

Linksys by Cisco Wireless-N Routers (model #s WRT610N, WRT310N, WRT160N)--Wireless-N is an ideal technology to deliver audio throughout the home in precise synchronization. With the Linksys by Cisco Wireless Home Audio system, there’s no need to hire contractors to drill holes in your walls and run cables throughout your home, to connect devices to one another. Now you have a system thats’s quick and easy to install and place virtually anywhere in your house.

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Customer Reviews

Cisco KWHA700 = FAIL
I ordered this the day of the release and somehow received a previously opened box, someone at Amazon decided to check the system out and try and re-package it to look unopened. However it's pretty obvious when the all the plastic sleeves that the remote and extenders were packed in had torn tape and wrinkles, cords not packed right, etc., not to mention the whole box being re-taped shut.

On to the system. Well there were a lot of things to like about the concept of this system, however Cisco must have outsourced the implementation because it pretty much failed across the board.

The touchscreen is inaccurate (yes I calibrated it) and unresponsive at times, though the QWERTY screen had nice size keys you have to type slow for it to register letters properly, and sometimes it would highlight the letter showing you pressed it, but the letter wouldn't actually register in the text box. You cannot power down the remote besides removing the battery. The remote failed to find the other components even though they show up properly in the packaged EasyLink software. The remote showed 2/3 signal when 3 feet away from my Draft-N DB router, and 1/3 signal when roughly 25 feet away. Both the remote and extenders failed to access my shared music folders, and would return the message "System Busy" nearly instantly like it never even tried to connect.

On to the extender with the display. Although Cisco claims that you can setup your system sans PC software, it completely failed to do so. The use of the side buttons to control the unit through the display is cumbersome and not well planned. Since they are universal you have to press one before the on-screen graphics are displayed to show you the action assigned to each button. When you do this, the system performs whatever function is assigned to it, so it may exit or skip, since you can't see the assigned action until you press it first. The button graphics at times block the left 1/3 of the text box used for searching and to enter your network password. Therefore you are unable to change to the proper letter because you can't see what your doing. The volume scroll pad around the power button is also poorly designed, you have to touch and leave your finger there for a second before you can scroll otherwise it doesn't register the move. You also have to scroll really slow so it can keep up, oh and don't accidentally press the power button while your doing it (the scroll pad is quite small). The backlight behind the power button is also really bright and annoying especially the orange when powered off at night. If they were smart they would have put the same scroll pad from the remote which also has up, down, left, right and center click, instead of the worthless power/volume setup.

On the extender without a display, it makes no sense to ship a secondary remote with it that has anything besides power, play/pause, volume and prev/next. instead they ship a full remote identical to the secondary that comes with the displayed unit beside changing the color of the home button, it's absolutely pointless beyond the simple controls I listed above since you can't see what you're doing. Unless they expect people to memorize the interface or something else ridiculous.

Overall, after hours of wasted time all I got was some Rhapsody out of the one unit with the display, I hooked up some bookshelfs to it and it sounded good for what it is. The PC control interface was pleasing to the eyes, it displayed each zone and would show album art within each zones frame. It was also easy to link the extenders into party mode with 1 or 2 mouse clicks, however it does take 30 seconds or so for the units to sync to one-another. Otherwise the system as a whole was a great concept, but complete failure. The remote interface was simple and easy to navigate, but if Cisco can't fix the touch interface and address its sluggishness via firmware, what good is it. Cisco stripped any sort of diagnostics or manual setup from both the extender/remote menus, as well as the PC software, so when their proprietary setup doesn't work you have no work-around. I used their walk-through install (after manual attempts failed) which includes a self-diagnostic, and according to it all my components installed properly, well so it said. And yes I re-installed and tried again, I also checked that my firmware was up to date, still no inter-system com's, nor access to my music.

Well that was my experience, not too swift! For a $1,000 I expect a proper product that works as designed, not with the major failures and flaws. These days processing power is cheap enough that no new device with empty memory/storage should run so poorly, I can't imagine it handling any sizable music collection without freezing. For this Cisco wasted enough of my time that I felt compelled to type my first product review.

Please remember you mileage may vary, I hope for others sake that my hardware was in many ways defective.

Poor player interface
I never review products but wanted to pass along my thoughts on all of the Linksys home audio products. I recently purchased 2 sets of the Premier package for a 4 room house that I wanted to stream music throughout. I liked the idea of a Director so that I could plug in the linksys speakers for the 2 rooms without a stereo system and the Player in the 2 rooms with stereos in them already. The set up took about 10 hours for me to complete. This included about 2 hours on my own, 4 hours (all in one setting) with the Linksys rep logged into my computer configuring everything, another 1-2 hours on the phone again with Linksys, and another 2 hours on my own. But all that being said, I didn't give this a 1* review because of the setup. The help was very good and eventually I got everything talking to each other as advertised. HOWEVER, after setup, I attempted to play a few albums from my collection. That's when I realized that the 'player' software was absolutely unusable. Without going into painstaking details, rest assured this is NO ITUNES. Albums can't be played in their entirety; only ONE SONG AT A TIME. This is from the Director's screen, the Controllers screen (ps. controller wireless range is poor, maybe 1/3 of other wireless devices), or from your computer control software. There was no option for playing 'entire album' from the list of songs contrary to what the online manual states. And, when you select Genre, it gives you a selection of albums.... who remembers which Greatest Hits goes with which artist... should be programed to go Genre-ARTIST-Album-Song like in iTunes. Long story short, the concept is nice, and the package nice, but the functionality is very poor. I have since purchased 3 AirPort Express', an Apple TV, 2 Bose sound systems, and an iTouch (to function as a remote when not in front of my computer or appleTV) to stream iTunes throughout my house perfectly. It actually COST LESS than all of the linksys products. Research and make your own decision. If you like iTunes then I strongly recommend staying away from Linksys... you and your party guests won't have any idea how to play music.

Horrific Product, Horrific Customer Service
I have never written a product review before but I wanted to share this horrific experience so that no one else will purchase this and have the same one. I don't even think this product deserves one star but for the idea of it, I'll give it to them.

I purchased this product in the hopes of having music in my house, accessing it via a cool remote and playing different music in different rooms. I very excitedly paid $100 for overnight shipping which then took 4 days. Once the box arrived, I uncrated everything and proceeding to set the system up on a brand new installation of Windows 7, a machine that had nothing on it and for which I was going to just stream music from. I'm a software engineer and like to think of myself as relatively smart. I had a friend with me who is also a software engineer... 8 hours later, the system simply would not recognize anything except the conductor. Finally, after removing everything and resetting up the system from scratch, opening up all firewalls, etc. I got the system to work...except the remote...that would never work and no amount of resets, no firmware updates, nothing would remove the "system busy" message. Then disaster occurred, Windows did an update (clean machine) and rebooted and wala when it came back everything was gone again (although to be fair, even though Cisco's software didn't recognize it, the Conductor would still stream music if I asked it to but only directly from the interface, my PC no longer recognized it). Back to square 1.

So frustrated I decided I would never trust this product and decided to return it... only I purchased it direct. Not only do I have to pay to ship back the most expensive consumer product I've purchased but they want me to pay twice because they shipped it in one box but require me to ship items INDIVIDUALLY back. On top of that I've called their customer support 4x... one time I had the customer service rep ridicule me... another time they promised to call back by end of day... nothing... emails with 24 hour response, I don't think so... 5 days later I'm still waiting for a response.

Yesterday I had the equivalent sonos system delivered. 5 minutes flat to install and music streaming downstairs!! And, I don't even need the killer remote control because my two iPhones and my iTouch can all control the system from anywhere in the house.

Cisco/Linksys, you're not ready for consumers. Buyer beware.