Microsoft introduced “Play to” with Windows 7, a feature built into Windows Media Player (and we can assume future versions of the Zune software) that allows you to automatically stream music and video from a Windows 7 PC to any network-connected device supporting the standard. These would include Internet radios as well as other Windows 7 PCs.
So far everything has been quiet but now Denon, one of the world’s premier hi-fi equipment manufacturers have announced a range of new products that support it, and that will allow you to play your PC-based music and video collections on both your hi-fi and TV.
This is an exciting prospect, merging the ever-growing digital audio and video libraries we’re all collecting, with our existing AV kit. There will downsides regards your electricity bill, with your PC always needing to be switched on for you to be able to access the files, and this, frankly, is no substitute for AV kit with an in-built hard drive, but I won’t knock it for that simply because Denon are well known for providing fantastic kit, and these will no doubt be no exception.
The models with the new functionality are the AVR-4310CI, AVR-3310CI, AVR-990, and the new 9.3 channel AVR-4810CI in addition their ASD-51W and ASD-51N iPod docks are also compatible with play to.
Source : High-Def Digest
