While streaming video, portable music players and music-enabled tablets and laptops seem to be getting all the love these days, the humble successors to table radios and alarm clocks have quietly (and sometimes not so quietly) taken up residence in homes. With prices for good entry-level units selling for $100 and change, plug-and-play Wi-Fi radio provides value and simplicity that deserves a close look.
An Internet radio works off a home’s Wi-Fi internet network and provides instant access to services like Pandora as well as traditional radio stations that have been liberated from the bounds of geography. In seconds, a listener can hear a live traffic report from London’s M-5, get up to speed on the latest electronic club music from Berlin or kick back to Portugese fados, Punjabi bhangra or you name it. And the music’s free.
There’s also a 99 cent app that turns an iPhone into a full-featured digital radio that can pipe sound to ear buds or a home audio system. Developed in Southern California, it can be downloaded at the App Store. Go to radioforiphone.com for more information.
At the other end of the spectrum, the Tivoli NetWorks ™ system ($749) offers an amazing audio experience in a beautiful box, with a social network to tap the collective brain when selecting musical programming preferences. We also looked at the Sonoro element W, a design award-winning German black box with cool yellow typography that sells for $499. It looked and sounded great but was hard to set up and incorporated some dumb design mistakes, like a non-intuitive power switch (press the logo, dummkopf). If used as an alarm clock, which the digital clock readout on the front clearly suggests was its intended purpose, finding the off-switch without opening one’s eyes becomes pretty much impossible.
A device that looks just as cool on a nightstand, has all the bells and whistles and sells for a third of the price: the Sanyo R227 WiFi internet radio.
Our hands-down favorite was the Logitech Squeezebox Touch ($299), purchased from the Fremont company’s web store. Compact and no slouch in the eye candy department, it offered a rich feature set (digital picture frame for family photos, album cover art, ambient nature sound effects, Facebook hooks and a big type alarm clock readout).
This version of the Squeezebox has no speaker or amp, so it’s like an iPod in that respect. First we plugged it into a Bose docking station, and it sounded great but that configuration didn’t offer stereo.
Besides, a second box on a cramped nightstand just didn’t make sense. We came across a compact amplifier that sells for under $100 that fits into the same kind of wall boxes that electrical light switches are wired into. It even came with plate covers in four colors, to match different decors.
This option requires snaking some wires through the wall, but when we plugged the Squeezebox into the Nuvo, wired up to two Klipsch R-1650-C ceiling speakers ($139 each and which destroyed more expensive Speakercraft speakers in a head-to-head test), the result sounded like a built-in custom home theater system that would cost many thousands. This Internet-enabled system was assembled for less than $800 in hardware, and the only external component, the Squeezebox Touch, is about the size of a small paperback book.
Miniaturization and Internet sourcing has made old component systems obsolete. The landscape of music is limitless, the technology’s market-ready and the prices are now irresistible.
