The Squeezebox Duet Network Music System, the previous update to Logitech's Squeezebox line of music streaming devices, was missing one thing: speakers. That's where the Squeezebox Boom ($299.99 direct) comes in. A natural progression from a company that makes top-notch speakers for PCs and iPods, the appropriately named Boom looks like a mini boom box. And it incorporates all the familiar Squeezebox streaming features, including wireless access to your computer's audio library and to music services like Pandora, Slacker, Last.fm, and Sirius Internet Radio. Its sometimes sluggish and mildly confusing interface requires a bit of patience, but the speakers sound excellent and rarely distort, making this compact system a solid choice to rock your next house party.

The slick little Boom, which measures 5 by 13 by 4 inches (HWD), is all black with a 2.8-by-0.6-inch vacuum fluorescent display (VFD) that dominates the front of the unit. The display scrolls station info and song titles at a size that makes it easy to read from across the room, and has an ambient light sensor that adjusts the screen's brightness for optimal viewing. Just below the screen, there are six white backlit preset buttons that can be assigned to summon your top Internet radio stations or even your favorite individual songs with one press. Below the presets, you'll find controls for power, track navigation, and volume; an Add button for tacking songs onto the ends of playlists; and a large knob in the middle of it all that scrolls through various menus or acts as another volume control, depending on what mode you're in. Since you can also use it as an alarm clock, there's a snooze button on the top of the Boom that doubles as a sleep timer.

The back panel has connections for power, Ethernet, a subwoofer output, and an aux input for iPods or other sound sources. The three-quarter-inch tweeters and 3-inch woofers are subtly angled upward, which makes for better listening—though a more pronounced angle would have improved the direct line to the listener's ear.

The remote measures 3.4 by 1.5 by 0.4 inches (HWD) and magnetically snaps into place in a recessed area on the rubberized top panel of the Boom—or onto, say, your refrigerator door. It features Power, Sleep, Home, Track, Menu Navigation, and Volume buttons. Apart from the fact that songs take a few seconds to load, the reaction time between a button press on the remote and the corresponding action on the player is fast.

Versatile when it comes to audio codec support, the Boom will stream most of your music collection, including MP3, WMA, unprotected AAC, Ogg Vorbis, MP2, MusePack files, and most lossless files (Apple, WMA, or FLAC). In addition, you can also stream uncompressed formats like AIFF, WAV, and PCM.

But how does it sound? First off, streaming audio sounds excellent. The Boom supports 802.11g Wi-Fi, and even at high volumes I rarely heard swishy cymbals or high-frequency distortion—artifacts that often go hand in hand with wireless streaming. During testing, streaming halted once or twice, but for the most part the signal was strong and worked at significant distances and through walls. Of course, your streaming success will depend on the strength of your wireless signal, but the Ethernet port lets you hardwire the Boom if you prefer.

Another product I reviewed recently, the Tivoli Audio Networks Stereo Radio, which starts at $600, streams Internet radio through speakers that seem to highlight the flaws of a low bit-rate stream. But the Boom sounds full and vibrant when playing content from sites like Rhapsody and Slacker, and even Internet broadcasts from traditional radio stations. Not only is it hard to detect any serious streaming artifacts, but the speakers themselves sound terrific. In the past, Logitech has used dynamic compression to ensure that, even at the loudest volumes, its speakers don't exhibit distortion. This is achieved by limiting the peaks of songs as the music increases in volume. Logitech claims the Boom doesn't implement this technology, but it sure sounds as if it does—at full volume, even extremely bass-heavy songs sound amazing. The sound quality is about as good as Wi-Fi–streamed audio gets.

Belying the Boom's sexy design and its good-looking display, navigation is annoyingly difficult. With only one menu option visible at a time, you feel as if you are blind-scrolling through a list, hoping that the option you're looking for pops up eventually. But are you even in the right menu? Sometimes it's difficult to tell. And although the Settings menu offers some nice touches—you can change the display's text size, and assign RSS news tickers or a spectrum analyzer as the Now Playing screensaver—there's no trick to help you fix the confusing menu issue.

Cuing up a song is not an instantaneous process—it generally takes a few seconds after you press play, regardless of whether it's streaming from some service such as Slacker or coming from your PC's music library. There's also some unnecessarily confusing nomenclature: It's pretty easy to mistake SqueezeNetwork for SqueezeCenter on the device's menu, and they're not the same thing. SqueezeNetwork is a free Internet-based service with radio station feeds and a "Music Locker," which stores your tunes so you can access them from anywhere you can get Wi-Fi. SqueezeCenter is the app you install on your computer to enable wireless streaming of your library, sync up music services with the Boom, and so on. They're both useful, and they deserve more distinctive names.

The speakerless Squeezebox Duet has similar weaknesses: sluggish reaction times and an occasionally annoying interface. The Duet costs $100 more, however, so I can say with confidence that, even though Duet's remote control has a screen that can display more information, the excellent-sounding Boom is a better deal. Tivoli's expensive Network Radio may look like more of a design piece than the Boom, but it doesn't sound nearly as good, nor does it offer any real music service tie-ins. So, for half the starting price of the Tivoli, which gets you only a mono speaker, you get stereo sound; access to Rhapsody, Slacker, Pandora, and other great music services; and the ability to stream music from your PC wirelessly on a system that looks and sounds great. The interface layout is a bit of a disappointment, but the Boom is still a fun way to stream tunes.