Sangean WFR-20 WiFi Internet Radio & Media Player by Sangean
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List Price: Our Price: Calculated in a shopping cart Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Category: CE See more digital camera details and other models |
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Digital camera reviews of Sangean WFR-20 WiFi Internet Radio & Media Player
Digital camera Review: Great Radio
Summary: 5 Stars
The sound quality is great!
Customer support from SANGEAN is great.
Works as promised.
Big sound in a little package!
Digital camera Review: Review of the Sangean WFR-20 WiFi Radio
Summary: 4 Stars
This device represents a great step in radio. You are able to get most any radio station in the world and many not available over the air.
The radio works good but there are a few problems (because its a computer after all). Some time when you click the back button, you get an error. But it works it out on its own.
All in all it works great and sounds good. I love it.
Digital camera Review: Good quality and good fun.
Summary: 5 Stars
Owned this radio for about 3 months and am very happy with it. Works great with the home wireless network, even though the wireless router is a fair distance away. Build and sound quality are very good. Can flip between streams from Paris, NY, London, Jamaica, Tokyo while reading the morning paper. It's great -- it's like shortwave for extrememly lazy people. Would recommend.Digital camera Review: Interesting Shortwave Alternative, Poor User Interface
Summary: 4 Stars
I bought this radio after returning a Bose Wave Radio II that had iffy AM reception. The quality of sound is comparable to the Bose - which is to say it is very good. Deep bass, decent highs.
But the interesting thing about this product is how it changes the paradigm of radio listening. It is transformational to all of sudden have high-fidelity access to 1000 times as many stations (literally - I do not think I am exaggerating) than you would with a traditional radio. Any radio station out there that streams its content over the web can probably be received by this radio. It is a sort of shortwave radio on steroids.
The technology is not faultless. You can access stations by location or genre, and up to 12 can be stored in presets. Once a station is selected, the audio does not come in instantaneously - it takes a while to 'buffer' the stream in. In some cases, if the radio's database has an incorrect URL for the station or the station itself is having issues, you do not hear anything.
Sangean uses a service called Reciva to access station information. You can create an account at the reciva website and register your Sangean radio there. Once you do that, any stations you bookmark in the 'My Stations' section of [...] automatically show up in the 'My Stations' menu in the radio. Very cool. If a station does not work, you can report it in reciva.com to have them fix the URL (though the response time in my case so far has been very slow).
The radio also supports streaming content from a PC - Mac or Windows. It ca do this by accessing a windows share or by UPNP server. Setting up the Windows share is a pain - mostly thanks to the design of Windows - but setting up a UPNP server is very easy and teh radio picks it up quickly. I went with Allegro Media Server - a $39.95 piece of software that published your itunes library as UPNP server. You can also do this for free using Windows Media Player 11 - I did not try that because I wanted access to my Mac's library running OS X.
The remote control is small with poor tactile feel, but I quickly programmed my universal remote to control the radio by learning the commands, so this was not an issue for me. The radio can be used without the remote (which is more than I can say for the Bose Wave Radio II), as Sangean implemented a very intuitive user interface with only one knob, but the remote is a huge help.
Overall highly recommended.
UPDATE:
After working with this unit for a few months, I have to downgrade it to three stars. Teh reasons:
1. The Reciva website - which basically drives what you can and cannot receive, is non-responsive when broken URL links (stations that do not work with the radio) are reported. Tens of emails go unanswered.
2. Reception of stations that do work is a crapshoot. Some come on reasonably fast, others take very long or stay in the "Retrying" stage permanently.
3. The user interface is painful. One button to do everything if you are not using the remote - and it is sow to respond if it needs to talk to the Reciva website first. Not ideal. The remote makes things a bit better, but not by much.
Note that I do not have a regular DSL or Cable connection - I am subscribed to Roadrunner Extreme - which is faster than normal broadband connections and provides a confirmed 4.6 Mbps download. I shudder to think what the performance would be with a slower connection!
Overall: Partially recommended - not sure there better alternatives in internet radios out there. The sound quality is excellent when it does connect.
Digital camera Review: Exceptional Product
Summary: 5 Stars
I already own a Roku Soundbridge M1001 that I have hooked to my stereo and which I love. I just got my Sangean WFR-20 about 1/2 hour ago and it was as easy to set up, maybe easier, than the Roku. It detected my home network the instant I turned it on and literally within 2-3 minutes I was listening to Internet W-Fi radio. It took about another 30 minutes to figure out how to find and set favorites on both the box itself and the remote but that was all it took. And it is playing a favorite Internet station from NYC (I'm in Sacramento) as if it was a local station. How cool is that?! The only thing I wish is that it was bigger and the sound was a bit richer. But for the price I am very happy and hope these devices keep getting richer sound. Highly recommended.