Sangean WFR-20 WiFi Internet Radio & Media Player by Sangean
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Digital camera reviews of Sangean WFR-20 WiFi Internet Radio & Media Player
Digital camera Review: Great for internet radio, a dud for streaming audio on home network
Summary: 3 Stars
I purchased this radio in January 2008, with high expectations. In many respects, the Sangean Wifi Internet Radio delivered.
Pros: Great look - sort of retro-meets-vintage with the modern lines and bakelite-like casing. The remote and radio controls are easy to use and intuitive. The sound is impressive. I am LOVING listening to a wide range of talk radio and music stations on this unit. Some stations come through with poor quality, but that is the fault of the streaming, not the radio. I love the Reciva.com interface. I can find what I want and add stations with a few clicks, and updates to the radio are quick and smooth. The Reciva.com forums are very helpful and interesting to read, as well. The fact that I have access to about 10,000 stations worldwide is overwhelming, but wonderful. I have been able to find some very interesting music options, including a dozen BBC channels, public radio stations from all over North America, and all kinds of news stations from everywhere you can imagine.
CONS: Although the online literature says that this radio can access and stream your computer-based music library through your wifi, I have yet to figure out how this is actually possible. I have followed the instructions and solicited help from users in the Reciva.com forums, to no avail. (And I am not the only one with this problem.) I finally gave up and transferred my library to an ipod, which I plug into the Aux Input on the back of the unit. Music sounds great through the input, but I would have preferred to keep the music on my computer and not buy the ipod.
Another big con is the range of the device's wifi. I have to keep my radio within less than 10 feet of the router to pick up the wifi connection, even though my wifi signal is strong enough to be picked up by my laptop two floors up and outside of my house.
Overall, this is a good unit that does a lot of cool things. I think they should improve the wifi range and work on the problems with sharing music from computer to radio. I haven't used any other wifi radios, so I can't compare them. I will say, however, that wifi radio is one of the coolest new gadgets out there. I am loving it!
Digital camera Review: What a blast! One great piece of technology.
Summary: 5 Stars
Recently my wife bought me a Sangean WRF-20 for my 7th AA birthday. I had been eying these machines for many months but would not spring the money. I am 43 years old and a short wave listener from childhood. I am also an Extra class ham radio operator, KC0LFW. For a living, I am an 'Electronics and Instrumentation Technician' at a large chemical plant.
This radio is fantastic! It is like short wave radio on steroids. After I powered it up the unit found my home network. I had to manually go to my wireless router and enter the radios MAC address. After another scan I was listening to the one factory default station, BBC.
Next I dialed up KIWI FM from New Zealand and set it as Preset #1. This is without looking at the book. I had a problem registering the radio at the Reciva site. After they emailed me back I corrected the problem. My mistake. The register and serial numbers are in hexidecimal. This means you only use numbers 0 through 9 and the letters A through F. What I thought was the letter "g" was actually the number "9". So write them down carefully.
The sound is comparable to a Bose Wave. Very good frequency response. I can feel the base with the volume set low. Ease of use is a 10. If I can fugure out how to use it without opening the manual, it must be easy. The remote works well as does the single button/ knob. I worried about this when debating buying the radio but I actually like it. It is very natural and has a positve, well-made feel. The display brightens up when you use change settings of any kind and then fades to dim after a few seconds.
Who would I buy one of these for? ANYONE! There is so much to listen to it is hard to know where to begin. A person can find any type of radio station located any where on the planet- and it is there. I would give the unit 10 stars if Amazon had them.
David Walkup
Digital camera Review: Works like a charm!
Summary: 5 Stars
This is a well-built product from Sangean and it has surpassed my expectations so far. I was looking for something that can play continuous music like Smooth Jazz or Classical without having to pay for Sirius or XM charges each month. Sure I could play all the Internet stations on my laptop, but its not the same as listening to them on a stand-alone device. Another option was buying an HD radio, but you are still limited to 10-15 HD radio stations in the area.
Pros:
1) It performs its function as a Wifi radio very well. It updates the radio station list from reciva.com everytime it is rebooted (remove power and plug it back in). The buffering time for most radio stations is between 5-10 seconds and it seldom has problems with bandwidth (I have comcast internet with Wireless-G router)
2) Sound quality is very good. I am not sure how it compares to a Bose Wave radio, but it certainly compares will with my Panasonic audio system. I listen to everything from Classical to Techno and this radio has been delivering clear, crisp sound in every situation. Its very clear till about 75% max volume and at that volume it is loud enough to have a house party.
3) Podcasts are easy to setup via the reciva website. I have NPR 7 am news, and WSJ audio feeds setup and it works really well.
4) Overall menu and interface is good. Its not too hard to navigate, but having only one knob can make it a bit cumbersome.
5) As a media player over uPnP, this radio rocks. For those who are not familiar with uPnP servers, this radio can play streaming audio from your home computer on the same network. So, you just go to windows media player and set it up to share media and then you can play all the MP3's and WMA's on your home computer from the Sangean radio. You can search for songs by album, artist, genre etc and setup a queue/playlist of songs and they sound great!
Cons:
1) The remote is good, but sometimes you have to press the buttons pretty hard. I have noticed that about 1 in 5 times I have to press the buttons twice to get the response. It is annoying, but not really a big deal.
2) The menu system on the radio needs a bit of improvement. It works and does all the intended functions, but some of the features take way too may steps.
Overall I 'highly recommended' this product
Digital camera Review: DOA
Summary: 1 Stars
The first radio arrived DOA. The second radio played well for about 10 minutes before the display froze when I tried to input another station. It then went blank and never recovered. I was of the opinion that there was a bad batch of these radios and it was just my bad luck to encounter them. However, the replacement radio had a number of small scratches on the bottom and now I'm wondering if Amazon had shipped me a returned or refurbished item. I paid for a NEW radio in good working order, NOT a RETURNED or REFURBISHED item.Digital camera Review: Excellent Radio
Summary: 5 Stars
My radio arrived last week. It is my first wifi radio and I had waited a long time before purchasing in order to do as much research as possible and read all the available reviews. I'm very glad I finally took the plunge.
The radio set itself up, pretty much as advertised, right out of the box. I did have a brief unknown problem finding an IP address or something, but it worked itself out when I restarted the radio by unplugging and plugging back in.
My results have been great. This radio basically brings the world of radio right to your home without the antenna systems, signal fade, and interference problems of shortwave and with high quality clear audio. And, it offers the thousands of stations and streams that you'd never be able to recieve on a shortwave radio.
While I appreciate having one-button operation on the radio, I do find it convenient to have the remote control handy in order to use the "back" button and to navigate up and down in menus while listening to a station. If you want to go "back" in a menu using the radio itself, it can sometimes take awhile to get where you need to be, and if you want to look for other stations while listening to another, using the radio button requires you to start at the top and then dive back down into the menus. With the remote, you can explore the stations in the same subcategory listed before and after the station you are listening to at the press of a single button. If you are the type who just wants to find your favorite stations and spend less time searching around eventually, this would become less of an issue. The remote also seems to have good range across a room. The battery for the remote was included.
The radio only has 12 presets, and it really should have more. But, this is not really a problem because if you register with [...], you can add an unlimited amount of stations (at least I haven't hit a limit yet) to your "My stations" folder. In effect, this list becomes your presets, and though there are a few extra steps to get to the list of "My Stations" as compared to accessing a preset station, it's not inconvenient to access these at any time. Anytime I find an intersting station while tuning around, I make a note to add it to "My stations" from the website later.
I have had very few occasions where a station didn't connect, and that is probably just because it is offline at that time. The sound quality is awesome. My radio has never been more than about 50 feet from my linksys broadband router (with cable internet) and I have had almost no problems with buffering, the notable exception being with BBC1, which, ironically, is the station that comes preset in preset 1 on the radio. I believe this has to do with the BBC1 stream; I know BBC1 is their most popular stream and I imagine that many people are trying to use it at the same time.
I have had a couple of experiences with an "internal error" message mentioned in other reviews. I don't know why this happens, but after about 20-30 seconds, the radio resets itself and reconnects to whatever I was listening to at the time. Really not a big deal for me so far, and as I said before, I've never had a perfect radio.
My media player function works really well and it is a pleasure to hear all the music stored on the computer through such quality speakers. The only problem I have had is with podcasts. To me, this is an extra feature anyway, so not a big deal, but when I try to stream podcasts from "my podcasts" which are saved in my profile at [...], the stream always stops at some point. Eevntually, the stream starts over but there is no way to fast forward to the point at which it stopped, so as far as my experience goes, the podcast feature is not a selling point on the radio.
All in all, I am very pleased with the unit and highly recommend it. It does everything I expected it to and more, and what it does, it does better than I had hoped.