FIA On3 Review

With the ability to play your digital music, movies, and image files through your analog or digital stereo system and most TVs, FIA has high hopes for the On3, their first digital entertainment product.

Summary

ID3 tags, playlists, and instant access to music are some of the things that make digital music systems so appealing compared to traditional CD players. With the FIA On3 not offering any of those digital enhancements, most music lovers might not find much of a reason to purchase the On3.

However, the On3 can be quite a useful device for a number of people. With so many people owning digital cameras and so few of them backing up their pictures, it is only a matter of time before their hard drive fails and they loose all of their important images. The On3 can help digital picture enthusiasts effectively “kill two birds with one stone”; they can have a safe, and easy to use backup drive as well as a way to view their images on their standard or high-def display.

Introduction

With the push to bring your digital media files away from your computer and into your living room, we’ve seen several companies take different approaches to networked multimedia systems.

Until now, most of the networked media devices we have reviewed are in a client-server configuration, meaning a remote server is required somewhere in your house in order for the device to play your media. FIA’s On3 digital media player and library takes a different approach, with the unit featuring 80 or 120GB of onboard storage.

First Intelligent Array (FIA) has been around the networking and backup arena since 2000 and is most known for its network-attached storage devices. With the company’s background on storage devices, it makes sense that they have implemented the media storage and the media player into one device with the On3. With the ability to play your digital music, movies, and image files through your analog or digital stereo system and most TVs, FIA has high hopes for the On3, their first digital entertainment product.

Features and Design

With the ability to play most of today’s popular digital media formats, the FIA On3 boasts quite an extensive list of supported file types. The On3 can play the following digital media formats:

Audio: MPEG layer 1 and 2, MP3 , WAV, OGG, AC3 and AAC.

Video: MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, XviD, RPM4, MOV, and AVI.

Images: JPEG, GIF, PNG and animated GIF (although the images don’t show as animated).

The On3 is a small blue plexiglass and silver aluminum box not much bigger than an external hard drive enclosure. With rubber feet at each of the eight corners, the On3 can be placed either on its side or bottom, making it easy to find a suitable location. However, as we’ve seen with most of the other networked media devices we have reviewed, the On3 doesn’t really go with most audio equipment. If you have a rack of black or silver components, this silver and blue brick might not look at home.

Included in the retail package is the On3 unit itself, an easy start poster and CD, a remote control, two Ethernet cables (one regular and one crossover), analog audio cables, and a power adapter. The manual states that the included crossover cable, which would be used for a direct connection to a computer, is a red cable, however, both cables included in our review unit were grey.  

The front of the On3 features a power/status light, an infrared receiver, and the power button. The status LED is yellow when booting and blue when the system is ready. While blue LEDs are all the rage in consumer electronics these days, the brightness of it can be quite distracting if the On3 is in your field of view. Similar to the blue LED on the AudioRequest Nitro, we could have done without it. At the rear are the inputs and outputs that allow you to hook the On3 to your home theater or stereo system and a display. For video hookups, the On3 features component video, S-Video, and a composite video connector. The On3 connects to audio devices with two sets of analog left and right RCA jacks, or digitally through a digital coax port or an S/PDIF optical port.

Rounding out the rear connectors is a 10/100 LAN port and a single USB 2.0 port. The LAN port allows you to hook the On3 to your network for configuration, uploading and downloading, and sharing files. The USB port allows you to add additional storage with a USB storage device, or to use the On3 as a network print server with a supported USB printer.

The rear panel also features a small cooling fan, a 12V power adapter plug, and an antenna jack. The antenna jack allows you to extend the infrared receiver with a special cable included in one version of the On3. FIA is also marketing the On3 as a mobile digital multimedia device, and the extended IR receiver allows you to place the On3 somewhere out of the way in your vehicle while still being able to use the remote control.

Because the FIA On3 has an onboard media player and integrated storage, it can act not only as a digital media player, but also to some extent as a network-attached storage drive. We say “to some extent” because it lacks the backup software that most NAS systems include, but if you add your own software to your client computers, the device can be used to automatically backup your important data. FIA uses Hitachi’s 7200 rpm, 8MB cache Deskstar hard drives for the On3.

Installation and Configuration

Initial setup of the FIA On3 is quite easy – simply connect the unit to your network, display, and sound system, plug the power in and power it up. The CD included with the On3 retail package features FIA’s “POPassist” utility, a program that helps you locate and connect to your On3. If you are able to find the IP address of your On3 by other means, such as looking at the DHCP status in your router, then you don’t need to use the CD. POPassist points your browser to the On3 management console, similar to other networked devices such as routers.

The web management utility can be used to control most of the settings of the On3. Since the On3 runs the file sharing protocol SAMBA and publicly shares its music, movies, and pictures folders by default, you don’t even need to use the utility to get started. Just browse to the correct folder and drag-and-drop your media to the folder with any computer on your network. Once you have transferred data to the On3, it can be turned on and used to view images and videos and listen to music.

The web management utility has a good looking interface

As long as you put your music, movies, and music in the corresponding folders, the On3 should properly identify the digital media loaded on its hard drive when you power the unit on.

Once we powered the unit on, our hopes of the On3 being the easy to use media player that FIA claimed were dashed. Once the unit booted, it was clear that we were dealing with the same software that drives the Actiontec Wireless Digital Media Player we reviewed in June. The On3 is in effect, the same thing as the Actiontec player, minus the wireless capability (although a wireless version is available) and with an added internal hard drive. This was quite a letdown, as our testing would soon show that the FIA On3 suffered from the same issues that the Actiontec player does.

Usage and Testing

As was the case with the Actiontec Wireless Digital Media Player, the FIA On3 lacks the host of audio playback features that digital audio buffs are used to. There is no way of making playlists on the fly or smart playlists, or even playing playlists at all. You can only play music sorted in folders, so if your music is sorted by artist and album, you can only listen to each folder at a time. Files are played back in alphanumeric order, so playback order depends on how the tracks are named. The On3 does not handle ID3 tags and track names are simply the name of the file.

Audio quality was acceptable. Digital music is only as good as the encoding process used to create it. We tested with all of the supported formats and found that with our high-quality MP3, OGG, WAV and AAC files, the On3 sounded great when connected through is digital outputs. Analog output was similarly clean and full, and as long as our source files were good quality, the music sounded great.

Accessing your files is easy to do with the On3′s menu

Digital video playback is also only as good as your source, and the hard truth with digital video right now is that unless you are making your own videos, there isn’t much of a quality selection available. Home videos turned into MPEG files looked excellent, as did some movie trailers we downloaded from the internet. DivX and XviD support is a nice-to-have feature, but unless you are involved in the illegal download of copyrighted materials, you won’t have much of a choice in legal material. We did experience some stuttering of large MPEG files, a problem that made watching some home videos and TV shows recorded with a capture card hard to watch.

Image playback is the strong suit of the FIA On3. It works pretty much like we’d expect it to and has a few nice features as well. One great feature is the ability to tie a music list to playback of a folder of pictures, allowing you to have a music background to your slideshow. Conversely, you can tie a folder of images to a folder of music, allowing you to view pictures when you select that music folder. You can choose to play your images in order (the alphanumeric rule applies here too) or randomly by folder. The On3 resizes images to your screen size on the fly. As a result very large images may take a while to load and small images will be quite distorted.

The responsiveness of the On3 remote control was the same as what we experienced with the Actiontec media player. There is a bit of a lag associated with button pushes on the remote, and as a result, a noticeable lag occurs when you switch songs or change images or movies. One major criteria we use in testing digital media players is if they perform better than the old-world products they are intended to replace. In this case, the On3 does not react as fast, or faster, than a CD player or DVD player.

Excellent Advanced Features

Response time and media playback options aside, there are some great features incorporated into the FIA On3. For one, the built-in SAMBA file sharing protocol allows you to create new shares, users and groups, just like a regular file server. It also supports AppleTalk, ensuring that most Mac, PC, and Linux computers can access the drive. The On3 also features an integrated FTP server and we were able to log into it through the internet to upload and download files. You can store more than just media files on the On3, making it both a file server and a media playback device. Transfer speed to and from the unit was relatively fast and easy.

Another great feature is the ability to have the hard drive turn off after a preset amount of inactivity. Using the web-based management tool, you can select to have the hard drive hibernate after 10, 15, 20, or 30 minutes, or 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 hours of idle time.

The onboard USB 2.0 port allows you to add an external hard drive or USB flash drive, greatly increasing the available storage. The USB port can also be used as a print server, however, as we noted in our Apple AirPort Express review, it just doesn’t make sense for most people to have their printer in the same room as their audio equipment. The point of such devices is to get your music and media files away from your computer.

FIA’s POPdirector interface also allows you to view the available storage for the drive and for specific users, and it logs system, user, and connection events. The system can also be set to email up to two different email addresses when certain events or errors occur. Besides having a few English translation issues, the POPdirector is an excellent management tool.

Conclusion

ID3 tags, playlists, and instant access to music are some of the things that make digital music systems so appealing compared to traditional CD players. With the FIA On3 not offering any of those digital enhancements, most music lovers might not find much of a reason to purchase the On3.

However, the On3 can be quite a useful device for a number of people. With so many people owning digital cameras and so few of them backing up their pictures, it is only a matter of time before their hard drive fails and they loose all of their important images. The On3 can help digital picture enthusiasts effectively “kill two birds with one stone”; they can have a safe, and easy to use backup drive as well as a way to view their images on their standard or high-def display.

After using the On3 for a while, we really liked the thought of it having onboard storage as opposed to the other devices that rely on data stored somewhere else on a network. The On3 does not require a computer network, and if implemented correctly, can act as both a backup drive and a media player. Hard drive and fan noise were minimal, allowing us to enjoy the music, movies, and pictures without annoying background noise.

As for the ability to use the FIA On3 in your automobile, we didn’t try it but there are a few downsides. You’ll need to buy an LCD display for your vehicle. FIA suggests powering the unit with a DC to AC power converter, but this doesn’t take into account the problem of shutting down your car while the On3 is running. That kind of action has been known to wreak havoc on car-based computers.

If FIA can ditch the software that runs the On3 and/or upgrade the hardware to allow for faster access of your files, they may have a hit on their hands. We’d like to see them add an automatic backup utility to the package as well. Until then, we suggest that those interested in the On3 purchase it for its handling of images and its backup potential, rather than its movie watching or music listening capabilities.