Sony CMTBX5BT CMT Micro Component System with Bluetooth Technology

This is a nice little system for the price but it does have some drawbacks, mostly due to its Bluetooth implementation -- which in fairness I should say is not all Sony's fault.

First of all, you must pair the receiver with whatever other B/T device you're going to be using with it; it is bidirectional, meaning it can transmit the audio it's playing to a set of Bluetooth stereo headphones (Motorokr S9, for example) or can receive audio from a music player such as an MP3-enabled cell phone, or (in my case) my laptop PC with a Bluetooth USB adapter. Once you've paired it -- which involves setting a pin code on both devices, a not entirely intuitive process -- you must then CONNECT it. While this is simple enough to do by right-clicking the CMTBX5BT in "My Bluetooth Places" on the desktop, then clicking "connect", the entire two-step setup procedure could easily confuse someone with limited computer experience. Also, once it's paired and connected, you play music on the laptop to the Bluetooth device, which appears to the computer as a set of headphones. In some cases, depending on what software you use to play music, you may need to reconfigure the default playback device to accomplish this -- another possible point of confusion for the technically-challenged.

However, the fun is just beginning if you happen to be using your laptop computer on an 802.11b/g WiFi connection. Bluetooth technology uses the same 2.4 gHz frequency band as your wireless LAN adapter, and interference between the two is almost guaranteed (do a Google search on "wifi bluetooth interference" to see how widespread the problem is). In many cases, depending on the distance from your machine to the wireless hub, Bluetooth will slow your network throughput to a crawl, if not kill it completely. Bluetooth and WiFi were originally designed as competing technologies, and therefore don't "play well" together. While WiFi uses a fixed frequency channel in the 2.4 gig band, Bluetooth uses something called "frequency hopping spread-spectrum", which means it will walk all over the airspace of any other device that happens to be operating there simultaneously. There have been some proposals for technical solutions to mitigate this problem (and some newer B/T adapters are advertised as being "802.11-friendly") but nevertheless, the chances are good that you will encounter difficulty if you try to use this device and your WiFi connection together.

In my case, my WiFi base unit is in another room, a total of perhaps 25 feet from the laptop, and normal download speed from the internet via my cable modem is in the 3-4 mB/sec range. As soon as I started sending Bluetooth audio from a streaming internet station to the Sony CMTBX5BT, however, this immediately plummeted down to under 100kB, and continued to deteriorate until it virtually stopped altogether. The effect of this was that the media player (Winamp) would constantly stop to buffer, play a second or two of audio, stop to rebuffer, etc. etc. It was simply unlistenable. As an experiment, I disconnected the base unit and moved it to within a couple of feet of the computer using a long ethernet cable. While this helped performance considerably, it would still stop momentarily to rebuffer every few minutes or so.

As I mentioned at the outset, this is really not the fault of this product specifically, and until the issue of Bluetooth-802.11 coexistence is fully resolved, hassle-free B/T implementation is ahead of its time.

Having said all that, if you are NOT wanting to use wireless internet and B/T together, this is a nice little system. If I switch off the WiFi, I'm able to pull up mp3 tracks from my local hard drive and play them wirelessly through it with no problem, and of course the FM tuner and CD player work great. Although the system lacks a changer, I can burn up to 10 hours worth of mp3's on a single disk for more than adequate long-play capability. While the the sleek black cabinet looks cool, I'm a bit disappointed in the speakers; they're OK but not outstanding. I hooked the system up to some Radio Shack bookshelf speakers left over from an old dead stereo from another era, and there was a very noticeable improvement in the sound quality. But for the price, this compact little stereo is hard to beat. Hopefully Bluetooth technology will catch up to it eventually.

UPDATE: I'm revising my rating from three to four stars as I've managed to resolve most of the issues mentioned above, which were, again, not the fault of the CMTBX5T to begin with. Physically relocating my WiFi base unit to provide a stronger signal to the laptop has for the most part eliminated the interference problem, although I have noticed that during times of intense internet activity (downloading a large file, for example) the Bluetooth audio will sometimes speed up or slow down slightly. Also, for a while I had a perplexing problem where the audio would drop out occasionally for several seconds at a time. After noticing that these signal interruptions seemed to be occurring with regularity, I timed them to find they were happening exactly ten minutes apart. This discovery prompted a close inspection of my computer's Bluetooth configuration, which revealed a setting to have it automatically scan for the presence of other Bluetooth devices every ten minutes. After disabling this auto-scan, the problem disappeared.

Overall, a very capable and good-sounding system.

This product is reasonably cheap, and the sound is decent for the price. I bought a pair of cheap speaker stands ($34) from Amazon, and it has improved the sound a lot. I would suggest anyone who buys this system does the same. I also got the bluetooth adapter so I can play music from my computer's itunes, and it works perfectly, although you should avoid the drivers on the CD that comes with the product as they messed up my Microsoft Office and I had to reinstall it. I suspect Vista is causing the problems, but plug and play worked fine with this device for me. Overall, a great buy!

Consistent with Sony's usual high quality, this is a solid shelf stereo system. All functions work properly and very straight forward and logical in their operation. I'm a bluetooth junkie so I really like the bluetooth capability, and it was really the chief reason for purchasing this particular unit. Paired up quickly to my smartphone and laptop with no problems. Lastly, unit looks good versus some other shelf stereos that look cheap.

I wanted to play music from my laptop onto this stereo so I bought the Iogear GBU221 adapter that was showing up in the "Customers Who Bought..."section. I got the bluetooth to play, but it cut off after about 30 seconds. I called Iogear 4 times trying to get this adapter to work by uninstalling the cd loaded driver and reloading the online one several times without success. I decided to review the comments on this product and one person said this Sony system requires Bluetooth 2.0. So I guess this adapter won't work and I wish Amazon had included this info on their technical details. Now the Iogear 2.0 adapter is showing up in the "Customers..." box. I ordered a 2.0 adapter and hopefully it will work.
Update...Ordered this cheap adapter, 100M Wireless USB 2.4GHz Bluetooth 2.0 Dongle Adapter for PC Laptop Notebook, and got it to work! It is Vista compatible and 2.0.

I had a bluetooth probelm with my Macbook Tiger connecting to CMTBX5BT. But after I upgrade to Leopard, Apple somehow just fix the bluetooth problem. Its a excellent product. Nice Sound and very fancy look.