Phorus PR5 Receiver - 24 bit / 192 kHz Hi-Res Music Streamer with Spotify, AirPlay, Windows Streaming, Bluetooth AptX, and Play-Fi

I needed a good wireless home entertainment system. Sonos was too expensive and limiting, I don't have the Apple ecosystem, and the AirPlay solutions for Windows (e.g., Airfoil) were kludgey and impossible for anyone else in the house to use. I have a good receiver hooked up to good speakers already, so Play-Fi to the rescue! I got a Kindle Fire 10, loaded up the Play-Fi app, plugged in the PR5, and all was good...almost. The system needed an update before it would work, but as luck would have it my home wifi failed mid-update and bricked the system. Phorus tech support was great -- one email explaining my problem got a response with 2 options -- they'll send me a new one ASAP, or click on the link to try a USB hardware update. Long story short: the USB update worked and I was up and running in 30 minutes. The DTS Play-Fi app is not perfect -- it works fine but the user experience needs improvement (it's confusing) -- but technically it works great. I primarily use it for Pandora and also my purchased music collection from my Windows media server. Both work great, with excellent fidelity. There is no audible difference between Pandora Premium and the direct CD player (formerly) attached to the receiver. I'm thinking of getting a couple more, attaching them to my home theater system and soundbar, to get sound in other rooms as well. Great product overall.

I'm using this in my workshop, with the line-out connected to a Lepai 2020 amp, which is connected to a bunch of random speakers I have, and it sounds pretty good. My original plan was to use this in a whole house setup, but it didn't work well there... And it ignores the volume control on my phone for some reason! Why can't I remote control volume on this?? The initial Play-fi setup process took HOURS. I had to enable GPS location on my phone (why???) in order to get them connected to my wifi network. Then I had to download a gigantic update and apply that, then another, and after all of that, it only works on the named wifi network you specify, which is bunk when you have several interconnected networks. (I have my ISP's network, and a second router with 2.4GHz and a 5GHz networks, and this only works on the 2.4GHz because that's the one I set it up on. Everything else on my network works by IP address and doesn't care what the network name is.) Using wifi / Play-fi seems to sound much better, but the app situation is *horrible*. You can only use the Play-Fi app to use the wifi, and it's a disaster. I have ripped my music collection to my phone, and playing that from my phone is so difficult, because the app makes it cumbersome. It'll do playlists, but if you have things organized by album it'll just give you all of the folders in alphabetical order, with no way to sort them. And there's a several seconds long pause between every song, which is very annoying. It's more for streaming music services, but then why are you using such an advanced decoder with radio quality streams. The Play-Fi app for Windows is better, it'll allow you to use your favorite music player, but there's about a 5 second delay overall, instead of between every song. But if you want to restrict the output from just the music player, or play to speaker groups, you'll need to buy the full version of the app for $15. And wifi signal dropouts do not recover gracefully. If it loses signal for more than a few seconds, it gives up and you have to go tell it which speaker you want to play to. I have had to restart the speaker after using the microwave many times because after a minute it just doesn't seem interested in getting back onto the one wifi network it knows. I thought the bluetooth would be better than average with it having APT but it's the same as any other as far as I can tell. I have an old house with plaster walls and if you're behind one, forget keeping a solid streaming signal. I think this is probably a limitation of BT and not just this unit. So this is OK if you just want to add an aux/BT capability to an existing setup, but the Play-fi part is nowhere near as simple or robust as advertised.

Mostly a great cheaper alternative to Sonos. I upgraded my wifi to the Eero wifi system so that I have strong wifi throughout my house and yard. You need good wifi or this just won't work well. I have 3 Phorus PR5 and 2 polk omni SR2 speakers. I have an issue with one of the PR5s which is hooked to my Yamaha AV receiver RX-V381 in the man cave because of the digital processing on the AV receiver. I've tried turning off the processing on the Yamaha and it helps but is still slightly off, my next step after exhausting the owners manual is to call yamahas customer service. I only mention this because if anyone is having issues with lagging it might be your AV receiver. If you are having connection issues or dropouts you need to look at your wifi. My other PR5s are hooked to regular receivers and they play in perfect sync. I have 1PR5 hooked to a Yamaha R-S202BL stereo receiver outside in the pool shed connected to a pair of Polk Atrium 5 speakers. I have another older similar stereo receiver (can't remember brand) hooked to another PR5 in our outdoor covered porch connected to 2 pairs of dual LU43PW speakers. the sound is awesome and fills my yard. I use the portable polk Omni SR2 speakers as needed in the yard or house. I am about to buy one more PR5 for my soundbar in the family room. I love being able to be in the pool or porch and come inside and the same music is playing everywhere. It's been great at parties. I mostly listen to my music in ITunes, Amazon prime music, Iheart or Pandora. Just be aware with ITunes it won't play from the cloud, it need to be downloaded on your device. I use my IPad or my IPhone. Update: April 2019 I currently have 4 PR5 receivers hooked to 3 Yamaha R-S202BL stereo receivers and 1 hooked to a cheap Pyle sound bar. 2 are outside in sheds. ( I had to replace the 2 original outdoor ones within the past month because they wouldn’t power up. However they lasted longer than I expected in the Florida humidity. ) One of the new Yamahas is hooked up to a Polk atrium8 which sounds great! The other 2 speaker setups are listed in my original review. I also have a phorus PR10 which I love! I gave up trying to hook up a PR5 to my AV receiver listed in the original review. It would not play in sync. I plan to replace with a new AV reciever with play-fi built in. I do not like the Omni Polk portable SR2 in my original review, (1 died) so I do not recommend those any longer. Overall I love my play-fi system. It works consistently and sounds GREAT.

Great for streaming mp3 music thru out your home or stereo system via Wifi. Once you get past the setup IP your homefree. The setup IP on one phone didn't stay connected long enough to finish setup. Had to switch to another phone which kept the setup IP connected long enough to finish the setup. So if you have trouble with setup try a different phone. After setup is complete you can use any smart phone with the app to send music to your speakers. Note! You will need to download and install another app "PR5" to complete setup. The Audacy music option is great for free music streaming of any genre. I use an old phone with wifi to control mp3 music sent to the speakers. If battery is weak/dead keep old phone plugged in. Works for me. FYi, After some trouble shooting, speakers work great with Play-fi PC App available for download: 1 On Win 11, this app must run in windows compatibility mode. 2 Once active, speaker control is made easy 3 PC becomes an excellent streaming source/server 4 Stream music using Win Media Player or any other active music source 5 Once Amazon Music or other source is active/loaded, sound is automatically streamed to selected speakers with excellent quality. 6 For ultimate ease and satisfaction, Play-fi PC App is a must and worth the 20 dollar premium. This is now my go to App for streaming audio to multiple play-fi speakers. 7 Note, the support website wasn't much help. Hope the above tips help.

On one hand, the Phorus PR5 receiver is very economical solution. However, I found numerous shortcomings. 1) the Apple Music app does not play songs without dropouts. However their own app seems to play my MP3s just fine. 2) the volume control needs some help. It has to be half way up to have a modicum of volume, then it gets louder quickly. 3) The physical on/off switch doesn’t work for me. 4) slow to connect phone to receiver and start playing. 5) connecting to home network is tricky. 6) says it is dual band, well I could not connect of 5ghZ, just feet from my router. 7) the power supply power cord is a bit short. 8) the stereo cables are short. Wish it had RCA stereo connector rather than that din8 plug. 9) not airplay 2 compatible. 10) An equalizer would be a great addition too. If these issues were corrected, It would be the most awesome product ever. If the price wasn’t so low I would have already returned it. Maybe the engineers can put out a firmware upgrade and fix some of these issues. Fix em all, sell for $99.99 and I’d have been very happy. Update: today I tried one that was about $100 more expensive. Well, my experience was worse so that’s something.

Item arrived quickly. Wouldn't work at all on arrival, needed an update. Wouldn't update via the Android app, had to use Windows app to install 2 updates then that failed and had to use Android app to install third and final update. Eventually got it to connect and sort of work. Streaming services via iHeartradio and Pandora are great. Local file streaming from a media centre or Android device is incredibly poor. Lodged support issue as follows on June 19th, no reply. Messaged again on June 25th, no reply. Message sent as follows: I have a PR5, under iHeartradio or Pandora, it works perfectly. If I use my Mediaserver, either Windows 7 or Plex (both the same machine) its really frustrating. When scrolling via say Artist or Folder, it shows 20 at a time and then loads the next 20, which takes a couple seconds each time. I have 286 folders/artists so it takes 20-30 seconds to scroll to the end. When I click on a sort methodology such as Artist or Folder, it should load all at once and allow me to then scroll them with no delay. Also there should be a quick-jump alphanumeric scroll like there is in the local device Music category. Secondly, when an album or folder finishes playing, the app immediately disconnects from the PR5 and you have to click the Search Device button, then go back through choosing the device/MediaCentre/Music/Artist/scrollscrollscroll..etc to get back to where you were, which is ridiculous. Also, if I'm playing a song from my media centre and I go to choose another song before the current one has finished, 50% of the time it disconnects me, all music stops and I get the Search Device screen again. Are these issues that are being worked on because while I enjoy Pandora/iHeart/etc I really bought this to control media on my media centre and currently its failing dismally at this. As an adendum to this, i've noticed that it doesn't display every song in a folder on either my media centre or my Samsung Galaxy S4 which the app is on. No reason for this, they display fine in Plex, tried editing the Mp3 tag information, no difference. The product doesn't do what it is supposed to do, if you want FLAWLESS operation go with something else. I also have a PS5 now (bought for me as a birthday present to go with the PR5) and thats exactly the same so I think its an app issue...not like I can return a birthday present though is it!

I bought this to hook up to an old Hi-Fi system (I mean it has a tape deck lol) that powers my outdoor speakers by the pool and it works great! I have two Klipsch Play-Fi Gates in the house and this product is much more reliable than they are. The sound quality is about as good you can expect from streamed MP3s and it is so easy to use my wife uses it daily. Only issue I had with this at first was that if my phone got to far away from the house (Like other side of the pool) the music would drop but I added a Wi-Fi extender to the pool house and now it never drops out.

This product delivers about half of the functionality it advertises if you can manage to set it up correctly. It gets a star because it does play audio over wifi (when it is the only Play-Fi device playing) and the bluetooth functionality works just fine. After unboxing it and hooking it up I downloaded the Phorus app from the Play store and set up the devise. The process was smooth and straightforward. That is where the smooth experience ended. My first attempt at playing audio resulted in stuttering and pauses every few seconds despite the PR5 having full wifi signal strength. After lots of searching I found a buried support page that suggested giving the Play-Fi device a higher QOS priority in my router. This is not a process that a novice computer user could undertake. It involves finding the MAC address of the PR5, logging into your router, enabling QOS (if your router has it), and setting the PR5's MAC to highest priority. After giving the PR5 a high QOS priority it started playing music smoothly. DTS Play-Fi advertises that any Play-Fi enabled devices can play back the same audio synchronized in different rooms. Given this advertisement I purchased another Play-Fi enabled device, the Polk Omni S2 speaker. The experience of multi-room audio on Play-Fi was abysmal. First off the Windows application that allows you to stream any audio to Play-Fi devices requires a $15 license key to unlock multi-speaker playback. Nickel and diming at its best. Lucky the Polk came with a free license key (which I had to email support to get because it was not in the box). Multi-room playback barely worked if at all. Selecting a second speaker disabled volume controls. Playback would start out of sync. Devices would randomly drop connection. Lots of rebooting all of the speakers and rebooting the application to try to fix things. It was a beta-test quality experience at best. If you are considering buying Play-Fi devices I think you would be better off pretending that the multi-room function did not exist. On top of all of the connection problems the Android app is low quality. It crashed frequently on me. Most of the music streaming services offered are not available in the United States. Why doesn't the app detect my region and remove them from the list? You essentially get internet radio, Pandora, and whatever music collection you have available on your network. Not a lot of options. Pros: Plays music over wifi from any source on a Windows PC Plays music over bluetooth Cons: Hard to set up Multi-room playback is incredibly buggy Android app is buggy Very limited set of music service choices I really can't recommend this product. If you want to stream to only one device using a Windows PC then I guess it is OK but otherwise it is a poor and frustrating experience all around. Maybe Phorus/DTS will fix the software in the future, but I am not waiting around. I switched to Sonos and it is light years ahead of Play-Fi in functionality and experience.