Philips Streamium resources

A website dedicated to helping people keep these great-sounding, eccentric old music streaming systems on the road, long after they were cruelly obsoleted by Philips. The systems this page is primarily concerned with are the three generations of the multi-room Streamium Centre/Station setup:

There are other Streamium products out there, some are still useful but others have now achieved Chocolate Fireguard status.

Here you can download service manuals - essential if you're contemplating a repair, or hacking in a larger drive to increase your Streamium's capacity:

Corrupted/old firmware? These devices carry a backup copy of their firmware on board, and to restore from that simply hold down the Source and Stop buttons while powering the unit up. If that fails, then everything you need is here:

WAC7500 Instructions

Apart from ripping tracks directly from the CD to the hard disk, the only other way of uploading/managing music on your Streamium was by using the appalling Media Manager software provided by Philips. This prompted a chap called Mathias to write WACHandler, a brilliant program that lets you upload, organise and back up the music on your system really easily. Like most things to do with the Streamium family of devices, his site has long since disappeared from the web, but the link above takes you to a copy held on the Wayback Machine where you can find the program itself, and full instructions for running it.

How to get root on your Streamium.

Picked up a cheap station but got no centre? Here are a couple of ideas for you.

WAC700 teardown! Need to get the PSU out for repair? Upgrade the HD? I'll show you how.

Want to get into the Diagnostic Menu? Simply hold down OK and Volume Up on the unit while powering on.

Other Streamium links worth a look:

Streamium Cafe - this was the official Philips forum where pretty much all the useful information, discussion and hacks for these devices could be found. Unfortunately Philips closed the forum about the same time as they shut down all the online features of the Streamium line, and even more helpfully, deleted it altogether in 2012. The link provided is to an archived copy, which - while incomplete - has yielded a lot of useful info. I haven't been through it all, so if you do find something not listed here please do let me know!
Power supply repairs - the vast majority of Streamium failures are as a result of the crappy Kingwall PSU fitted to all models listed on this page (and others!). Unfortunately, it's not as simple as the usual fix of replacing the capacitors, but Jonathan repairs them for a very reasonable fee. I can personally vouch for his service, as he's succesfully repaired two of mine, as well as a duff audio board. He does it through eBay; just do a search on there for 'Streamium repair'.
A massive archive of user manuals for all things Streamium over at the very wonderful Wayback Machine.
streamiumd 1.0 file server - dissatisfied with the hopeless PC Link software supplied with his Streamium MCi200, Dave Witt wrote his own replacement server in Perl. Not only does it stream MP3s, but it can 'trick' the device into playing internet radio streams, as long as they're MP3 format. This will apparently work with some other MCi Streamiums (although I'm not having much luck with my MCi298 thus far) but not the WAC multi-room systems. streamiumd is based on an earlier piece of work by Nathan Peterson.

Site last updated 6th August 2023.