Iamm NTR90

Important note: the HD TV tuner in this media centre is a DVB-T tuner rather than a DVB-T2 tuner. This means it cannot pick up HD Freeview channels in the UK. It should, however, have no problem picking up HD channels in other countries or SD channels in the UK.


Very attractively priced (under £150), the Iamm NTR90 digital recorder also looks nice, has an SDHC reader and network connectivity. What can we really expect at this price? Answers to follow.

Design and build: a colourful but sparse menu

Any commentary on a product's design is of course a subjective matter. Nevertheless, we do like the shape and feel of this media centre. The shell is glossy black - a bit of a dust magnet obviously - and the lower part is in red aluminium.

Either a 2.5-inch or a 3.5-inch hard drive can be lodged inside. It's cooled by a very small fan, which nevertheless proves quiet and efficient - neither the hard drive nor the decoding chip reached high temperatures during testing.


A standard remote is supplied to help you navigate the menus. Good quality plastic has been chosen but the buttons themselves give it a rather low-end feel. There's no backlighting or phosphorescent coating.

There doesn't tend to be much variety when it comes to the interface on digital recorders. Here, Iamm has slightly reworked things, adding attractive colours and graphics.


Nevertheless it isn't a patch on what Dvico is offering on its Tvix S1 Duo and Tvix 6632N, especially as no advanced features are on offer here. Here's a summary of the various usage areas:

Photos: nothing in particular to report here, except that you can't display photos in thumbnail form. You can of course zoom in and rotate images, though there is a slight delay in execution (2 seconds).

Music: only MP3 tags are recognised. Album covers can't be displayed, whether internal or external to files.

Video: no options here either, no video jukebox on the agenda.

Compatibility: no surprises here, pretty much what you'd expect

Basic multimedia file compatibility is on a par with what you'd expect from this type of media centre. All HD video formats (2D only) are supported, up to a maximum of 55 Mbps for MKV/H.264 files and 90 Mbps for M2TS files.

On the audio side nothing unusual to report either, other than the fact that you can't convert Dolby TrueHD to stereo (PCM). There are several options for Dolby Digital and DTS however. There's support for stereo downmixing (PCM). You can decode to 5.1 and send to an amp or even send the raw audio to an external amp (bitstream). Only the core part of DTS HD MA formats can be decoded or sent to the amp.

There's playback for ISOs and RIPs of Blu-rays and DVDs. The various audio tracks and subtitling remains intact and accessible. Menus are only displayed for DVD backups however, not Blu-rays. Note, there's a bug which distorts positioning of a selected section. This can be frustrating as you don't necessarily know if you're hovering over the right area or not.

Connectivity: again, pretty standard

No real surprises here. At the back you'll find HDMI, optical and composite connectors. There's a USB port which allows you to link the centre up to a computer and use it as an external hard drive.

On the right hand side of the casing, there are two USB Host sockets to link up various peripherals. There's an SDHC card reader just beside them. You can copy files via the USB. Speeds are pretty good: 14.2 MB/s. Playback of HD files from a USB key poses no problems.

You can connect to your network via either a 100 Mbps ethernet connection or the optional wi-fi via a USB adaptor. You can copy files from a computer to the media centre or vice versa. You'll need some patience here however as the average speed is no more than 5.6 MB/s. Streaming of full-HD video is feasible, as long as the MKV/H.264 videos don't exceed 34 Mbps.