Gramofon - WiFi Music Player for your Speakers (Featuring Spotify)

This is by far a huge terrible disappointment.. After going through about 10 of these and returning them because the firmware wouldn't update, Strick #1, tech support finally told me about a back way to upgrade the firmware after about a month of return shipments. So I upgraded firmware and I was pissed to find out that every gramofon has a back door entry that requires a password that is kept secret from the user. Strike #2..Nevertheless I set all 4 Gramofons up on my wifi network.. Then trying to get them grouped together was another stupid hassle and it always is Strike #3 using the jukebox app.. I would see the gramofons in spotify, but jukebox kept saying there were no available players, so I had to reboot the gramofons a few times to get them all to show up in jukebox before I could even start to listen to music around the house. Strike #4.And then after finally getting all Gramafons working I crank up the music a little bit and it starts cutting out, so I immediately have to turn down the volume all over the house while all the gramafons spit and sputter at different times before taking my entire wifi network down Strike #5..Technical support says I have too many devices on my wifi network and thats the problem. Fine I will obtain a second wifi router and have a completely independent network, technical support advises against an independent network? Why? Well I found out because all of the same problems I had with the first network with too many wifi devices on it happened to the independent network with no other wifi devices on it Strick #6.Not only do I have the same problems, but the gramofons for some strange weird reason, completely take out the independent wifi network just like they did with the household wifi network. When they do this, they just blink blue for no internet, and they are all blinking blue and they will stay that way for about 30 mins to an 1 hour unless I reboot the router they are on. Strike#7Not only that, but I cant play audio I want to play through the house, I am stuck with only being able to play spotify or some other paid service, well they do have some free services out there that can work with these, but im sure they suck just as bad as the gramofons do.. All I wanted was to be able to play music around my house, I spent a lot of money, I set up an independent network, more money and I still get the spitting and sputtering and total complete meltdown of whatever wifi network they are attached to, .... To the point of needing to reboot the router or sit in silence for the next hour. Who has that kind of time? Technical support says maybe there are people walking around blocking the signal. SO now what? Throw everybody out of the house so I can listen to music around the house? I have a bose wave radio that streams music through internet, no problem, no drops, no spitting.. I have a smart TV that streams Hi Def movies of wifi, no spitting, there either.. I have streamed hi def movies and played spotify through the bose in another area at the same time, both on the same network, no problem. So I found a day when it was just me at the house, cranked it up for about 30 mins before I was getting spit on by the gramofons again.. Strike # FU courtesy of gramofon. I think these do so much internet reporting on us that they cant perform for us. If there is no internet they cant work, which means they are dependent on outside control of some sort that is kept secret. Im thinking its their network so overloaded with gramofons reporting back to them about us about us that they fail to function. We should NOT need an internet connection for these to function.. There is something very very wrong with that and if I had only known this before making the purchase, well then that is a purchase that never would have happened

Really glitchy product. I love spotify and I was excited to have a relatively cheap option to play a higher quality music without having to plug in my phone at my stereo. It was relatively easy to set up. The steps are not confusing but getting the network to stay was the problem I had. It would show 4-5 bars and excellent connection for my wifi but then would tell me there was not a network when trying to setup so I would have to go through the whole thing again. Once I finally got it set up, the network would last a couple of days before it was not recognized again.Seeing some of the other more recent posts, I have decided not to utilize mine anymore. I don't like creating a whole new open network for all to utilize, even if it is short range. I thought it would be transmitting over my current network but mirroring a network and not having it protected even with a minimal password is unacceptable to me.

Seriously puzzling product due to inadequate, scattered, documentation. Initially, you power it up, install the Gramofon Setup app, follow the instructions (first putting your device onto the Gramofon's own wifi network), ultimately type in your own home wifi network details (including password, which must not contain certain characters). My network's password did contain '!', and, since '"' and '?', as I recall, were listed as not allowed, I thought *maybe* '!' wasn't, either, so I changed my password (requiring us to alter this on all connected devices). That appeared to get us further along, but the AllPlay app was never able to detect the Gramofon on our network.Just now, researching this a bit further, I'm seeing that you can get far better results if the firmware is updated. I purchased mine on Amazon on September 18 (one week ago; still not functional), and mine has firmware version 1.2.26. Reading here,[...] I see that, if I update to 3.0.15, things could look better. In fact, in another Amazon review, the purchaser raves about the results of this update. I'm ready. Oops, the caveat with this is that reference claims the following: "If you use a firewall, please make sure that port 7547 is opened to enable the upgrade."Hmm. How desperate am I to open up my firewall? I'm not, really. The documentation isn't specific about whether this port must be accessed outbound or inbound; if it was outbound, I'd be fine with it. But, if it was outbound, why didn't my device automatically reach out and find and install the upgrade? Roku does that, I think. Let's see if anything happens if I restart the Gramofon (could be, it did pull down the upgrade, and needs a restart) ... Nope. No luck there.Let me figure out my MAC address, for this device, file my support ticket, and see what happens. I will attempt to clarify the part about opening up the port, and what use my MAC address could be to someone not on my network. We'll see ...