The new AudioTron digital music player lets you connect your PC to your stereo system and play all the MP3s you've downloaded from the Net through your living-room speakers. Just plug it into your PC or home network and it automatically finds and plays music right off your hard drive. Trouble is, setting up the AudioTron on a home network proved to be a foray into Hell that consumed an entire day, gave me the worst headache I've had in years, put me in a filthy temper and had me either purple with rage or crying hot tears of frustration. It was partly bad luck with incompatible equipment, partly the manual, which is unclear and incomplete in places, and partly my own ignorance and incompetence. But it was mainly due to being forced to enter the dark, horrible world of computer networking, a realm best left to the professionals.
Networks are complex things.
If anything goes wrong, it can be for any number of reasons, and it invariably takes hours of your short, precious life to figure out. At first, setting up the AudioTron appeared to be pretty straightforward. Then you either plug the player directly into the back of your PC with an ethernet crossover cable, or into an ethernet hub or router. It also supports home phone-line networks. The network serves about seven ethernet ports around the house, happily sharing a cable-modem connection among a handful of Macs and PCs.