I bought it for a little over $200 on eBay shortly after Neodigits-Helios went belly up. I figured for this price I can afford a toy to play with. Actually, X5000 was the only viable option for my almost-high-end home theater solution. My media room is 35 feet away from a room where all AV equipment is installed. A set of cables from the AV rack to the media room does not include HDMI as its installation took place before HDMI was invented. X5000 is the only Hi-Fi grade device that is capable of outputting 1080p via component out.

The unit is beautifully made and it does not look cheap compared to Marantz DV9600 and SR7500 in the same rack. As far as performance goes, audio is stunning. I wish it played SACD and DVD-A, but other than that, everything is great. Video isn’t as hot as Marantz 9600 via HDMI, but seems to look much more natural than whatever comes out of Marantz 480i fed through DVDO HD+ scaler (as you know, it cannot output 1080p via component, only HDMI). Moreover, it scales not only DVDs, but also digital files of pretty much every video format known to a civilized man. By “not as hot” I mean that it does a pretty good job with all tonal range except dark shadows where it fails to resolve fine detail.

Setup was not that difficult, but interface is surprisingly ancient compared to what’s available right now. I m not talking about NeoLink, the user interface of the unit itself looks like it was done in a hurry just to get it out in time when hardware hits the market. There is no capability to change font size, and at 1080 resolution letters and icons look tiny. Outspoken Helios Media Portal shows a broken link (I guess this is because there is nobody there anymore to keep it up). No matter what I tried, WiFi did not work. Ironically, the software warns you about this by stating “no connection” at the bottom of the screen. Ethernet connection, however, worked on a fly with DHCP on. The most disappointing thing about the user interface is that it does not offer a capability to copy and transfer files between drives and does not rip media on the hard drive. It would seem entirely logical since it has two USB ports. In my setup, I have a 1TB HDD connected to the back of the unit and use side USB port if I have something on a flash drive to play.

There is one nice thing about the software: it is fully compliant with UPnP protocol, hence it sees not only computers with NeoLink, but anything that runs a UPnP server. For instance, it recognizes my Escient Fireball music server and can play music from it.

X5000 can also be recognized by other X5000 and X3000 on the local network if you enter its IP address as a Helios server in their setup, but… What is again disappointing, there is no way to assign a name to it, so it is impossible to use this feature on a network with dynamic IP distribution.

However, once the thing is up and running, one tends to forget about its shortcomings because its strong features outweigh them greatly.

Conclusion: Helios is an overpriced hunk of nothing.