Login to find out how easy our expert lab found this radio to use, and how good the maximum volume of this radio is. This affordable, compact tabletop radio excels — few radios sound this good. It has a beautifully warm tone that elevates a wide range of musical genres and means speech is wonderfully clear.
Pricing and recommendations correct as of November DAB radios are more than just broadcast devices. To get the most out of yours, consider models with the following useful features:.
If you and your partner need to get up at different times, look for a model with dual independent alarms, an increasingly common feature. This way, you can easily buy yourself 10 more minutes in bed when needed. Even if you intend to use your radio at home, battery power can be a useful feature. For some tabletop radios you can buy a separate battery charge pack, giving you the benefit of portability without the compromise on sound quality you often get with dedicated portable radios.
It allows you to stream internet radio, and any other audio on your smartphone, to your DAB radio — so you can listen to everything from podcasts and audiobooks to your personal music collection. If you prefer a wired connection or have an older MP3 player or other device, look for a model with an aux-in socket, although these are becoming rarer. Many DAB radios, particularly alarm clock models, have one or more USB sockets for charging portable devices including your smartphone or tablet.
This is particularly handy if you want to save plug sockets when using your radio by your bedside. Some radios have a dedicated remote control, or an accompanying smartphone app that can act as a remote control. However, not all remote controls are equally good: look for one with large, well-labelled buttons, where the most-used buttons fall naturally under the thumb.
Roberts and Pure are the two best-known British radio brands. However, our testing shows that their radios are not always the best, and that they even make some real duds. Be especially careful here for hidden charges. Then you can add the price of the battery pack on to the price of radio, to find out what the full cost of buying the radio really is compared with other models. At Which? For radios with sold-separately charge packs, the charge pack model you need is listed there as well. By considering radios with sold-separately charge packs as tabletop models, it also means they go through our tougher scoring system for home-use radios — for more on this, see our how we test DAB radios guide.
DAB radios are easier to use because you simply choose the name of your preferred station, rather than having to tune it in manually like you do with FM. DAB radio generally has good coverage across the UK, but in remote areas you might still struggle to get a good signal and have to use FM or internet radio instead. If you live in a valley between steep hills, or in an urban area surrounded by tall buildings, it will be harder for the radio signal to reach you.
Our lab experts rigorously test the reception of radios so you can find out which have the best signal — look at the test results tab in our reviews to see how sensitive each model is to picking up radio stations. It depends on how clear a signal you can get in your area, where you position your radio, and how good its aerial is. You can easily switch between the two to get the best sound quality wherever you are. Theoretically, internet radios have the potential to have the best sound quality.
FM-only radios often look temptingly cheap and are usually found in less digitally focused high street shops such as supermarkets and DIY stores. That, though, is looking less likely than it did just a few months ago. The BBC's distribution strategy then the March speech by director of radio and music Bob Shennan make it clear that Auntie is in no hurry to see it happen — and when it does, it may not be DAB that we'll be switching to.
As even the BBC reported back in , it was something of a protracted labour — the first test transmissions had begun five years earlier, and the original research was even older. Even so, the market was far from ready for DAB. The first receivers were not available commercially until two years later, comprising largely high-end receivers for audio buffs and expensive car sets.
Coverage in reached 60 per cent of the population, reaching 80 per cent by the end of and another 5 per cent a year later. Early sets were costly and the audio was far from the CD quality that people have been led to expect. Take-up was fairly slow and, initially at least, rules and regulations prevented the BBC from providing services that weren't universally available, so launching "digital-only" stations was out of the question, until a rule change in Meanwhile, the commercial Digital One ensemble had launched, with analogue stations that committed to a digital simulcast receiving an automatic licence extension of eight years.
By , the stage was more or less set for a boom in consumer interest, with the addition of local ensembles that provided stations from both the BBC and the commercial sector the opportunity to reach listeners on DAB. Some of those, like 6 Music, have a tremendously loyal following. A threatened closure in sparked a campaign that showed that digital-only services were perhaps more popular than was imagined — but just how many were listening on DAB?
Ofcom's data on sales shows a remarkably static number from to , with 1. Radio sales overall are down, but analogue sets are still outselling digital by two to one. Anecdotally, too, there's a common reason why some aren't sold on DAB. Even in London, very often coverage can be ropy, especially indoors.
Long-time DAB users will be familiar with the sort of warbling underwater sounds that arguably are far more annoying than the background hiss of a weak FM signal. Even if you do get great reception, however, you're still faced with the sad fact that, far from offering higher sound quality, in many cases what you'll get on DAB is worse.
Worse than digital TV and worse even than FM. As so often with digital broadcasting, bandwidth is the problem, compounded by a decision to stick with older technology. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with that — FM has used the same technology for decades, after all. But as more stations have launched, bit rates have dropped to accommodate more channels in the same bandwidth, and even Radio 3 doesn't really have a high enough bit rate to provide the best quality sound — it runs at Kbps.
Most other BBC music stations are at Kbps. A lot of others aren't even available in stereo, which seems pretty bonkers in the 21st century. Of course, just because HE-AAC is capable of producing better sound in the same bandwidth, that doesn't mean it will. It could equally well be used to provide more "choice" instead. Nevertheless, as the figures from iPlayer show, it's able to provide stereo audio in as little as 48kbps.
High-definition pictures provided an incentive for many to upgrade, but when it comes to digital radio it feels like sound quality is secondary to content, and perhaps is not necessarily that important to consumers. Even poor DAB is likely to be better than an AM signal to most of us, but some people's ears don't really notice: Ofcom surveys claim 63 per cent of people surveyed had experienced the "clear and high quality sound" of digital radio.
Perhaps they all grew up listening to Radio Luxembourg on Medium Wave. While that's entirely true, it's an argument that doesn't seem to have fazed proponents of a complete switch to digital radio, which would obsolete millions more FM and AM sets. DAB has finally achieved a reasonable household penetration in recent years, with There's simply not enough of it for all the current analogue stations to make the switch. There are no upgrade plans, however, and with no more expansion of DAB looking likely, those for whom sound quality is important will need to listen to digital radio via other means — the internet, Freeview or satellite.
Future Chromium-based browsers under administrative control will be able to prevent users from viewing webpage source code for specific URLs, a capability that remained unavailable to enterprise customers for the past three years until a bug fix landed earlier this week.
Back on October 15, an employee of Amplified IT, a Google education partner since acquired by CDW, filed a bug report describing how the Chromium URL Blocklist — which administrators can set to conform with organization or enterprise policy — doesn't actually work. We have a few quibbles, like the way scrolling text makes the display flicker and the tiny buttons set into the front panel.
Like vintage style and old-fashioned class? The display even shows station or album art. The big surprise here, though, is that the sound is so warm and punchy, although it takes on a slightly boxy tone as you push the volume up. Key specs — Output: Not stated; Display: 2. DAB clock radios are often either too big or too basic, but this compact number does it all.
Music is detailed and surprisingly spacious, and talk comes through crisp and clear. It gets much louder than your average clock radio without losing any clarity. It also moonlights as a Bluetooth speaker, although here we found the output got a little muddy and congested as you push the volume up. Make no mistake: this is the DAB clock radio that other clock radios wished they were. DAB is great in good signal areas, but if you live somewhere with poor signal strength, you could be missing out on a lot of the best stations.
It also features Bluetooth and Spotify Connect. Sure, the 1. The latest version of the prestigious British DAB radio is better than ever, with a touch of Scandinavia in the stripped-back bookshelf design. It looks great and sounds fantastic, with more weight and authority than you might expect from a compact, bookshelf radio and impressive levels of space and detail.
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