This is an excellent radio. You can get an app to control it from your phone or tablet too.

A great radio. I got one for my wife a year ago. The best bit is you can choose FM , DAB or Internet. This means you don't get caught out if you cant get a signal, just switch to a different mode. DAB -> FM -> Internet would be my order of preference. The internet is clear sounding, but if you turn the unit up load you can hear the compression (bit rates vary with broadcaster). The clock can be automatically set from DAB, FM or internet. The internet option will use your routers time, if you have your router set to DST then make sure you turn DST off on the actual radio, or it will double count the hours!

+1

For a useful example of the attitude towards quality, look no further than how the BBC came up with a better DVB-T2/DVB-S2 mpeg encoder, and rather than use it to make the picture better, dropped the bandwidth to make the quality roughly the same. And also dropped the bandwidth on S2 to match T2, even though satellite bandwidth is not a constrained resource like terrestrial broadcasts.

If the UK had gone DAB+ like all of Europe did, all stations would be stereo, higher fi and less dropouts. A technocracy the UK is not.

Similarly, if we dropped the obsolete mpeg2 coding in favour of mpeg4 on freeview, we'd have better quality picture. UK was the 1st to have digital terrestrial radio and tv broadcast, the price is that with the time other countries have overlapped us technically.

Just to add - make sure any purchase of a DAB radio is fully compliant with the new BBC HLS streaming service, as they didn't bother telling manufacturers they were going to change them!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/internet/entries/2ff95543-7547-4b2d-9305-563428fb74f5

http://www.whathifi.com/news/listeners-complain-about-changes-to-bbc-internet-radio-streaming

You are correct, however the bit rate has been dropped even lower!

" Radios 1, 2, 6 music and 1 Xtra will use 112kbps each instead of 128kbps – all the services remain in joint stereo."

8. Why is BBC Music Jazz in mono?
There is only a fixed overall capacity available on the BBC national multiplex and this must be managed carefully to achieve good quality across the wide range of services that the BBC, as a public service broadcaster, aims to provide.
Achieving the right balance between the number of services offered and the bit rate allocated to each can at times be difficult.

We have taken considerable care over the technical arrangements needed to allocate suitable capacity for each digital radio services.

This does mean the capacity individually allocated to some services has had to be reduced at certain times in order, for example, to bring part-time services to listeners.

This will continue to be the case on occasions when we consider the balance across our digital radio services demands it. The bit rate on Radio 1, 1Xtra, Radio 2 and 6 Music has been reduced from 128kbps joint stereo to 112 kbps joint stereo to allow for BBC Music Jazz.

BBC 6Music isn't Mono, sound quality is pretty good too!

Sigmals around West Yorkshire are usually pretty good, its the quality of devices antennas that is often the issue.

Thanks for the tip, I listen to internet radio daily (either via my Lumia 640 +TuneIn or my Pinell Supersound 2). I'll give Star FM a go, being largely a Classic Rock listener. Sweden has some good classic rock stations I used to listen to on FM when I worked in Stockholm, give RockKlassiker or Bandit Classic a go. The latter has a very limited playlist but few adverts during the week. Somehow I find adverts I don't understand a word of less annoying anyway :-)

maybe Roberts skimped on the RAM so there's not enough buffering to recover when there's short bursts of congestion.

You might have thought that, but mine is high speed cable broadband so there's no way it should drop the connection. I think it depends more on the number of subscribers connected to the broadcasters servers.

It's interesting to listen to same station on DAB and Internet stream, and experience how bad the sound is on DAB. Most DAB stations have reverted to mono (are we back in the 60's?). Internet radio is good though. I discovered Star FM from Sofia, Bulgaria some time ago - plays classic rock like no UK station, not even Absolute radio (I use a £50 Sandstrom radio, however it will play on virtually anything connected to the internet).

I got one of these about 6-8 months ago. I love music and have such a varied (depending on mood) taste that I found the choice on dab and fm was just awful. Not only was it repetitive but the sound was bad on DAB.

Plugged it in, set up both alarms ... First set to an ambient music station for a soothing morning rousing. Second set to a classic 80/90s station. Funky enough to get me bopping as I drag myself toward the shower.

Great quality sound from the unit - admittedly whilst there are thousands of Internet stations, there is thousands of dross and plenty of low quality streams.

But, with a bit of patience and the use of the 20 presets you will be good to go in no time at all. Not listened to dab, fm or my iPod since!

Can't recommend this enough! - it's a shame that the bbc decided to change the transmission of their stations as this stopped the listen again function from working. It used to play bbc programmes from the iplayer! But, in a way I am glad as I have branched out and found plenty elsewhere!

doesn't that depend more on how good your internet connection is, and whether you have a good wifi router?

thanks

It depends very much on the station you choose to listen to. Some are good at 320Kb/s others like the BBC are really poor at just 128Kb/s mono only. As a Hi-Fi source that's just not good enough, especially for classical.
Then when streaming there are the constant drop outs while buffering and sometimes they drop out altogether.

It's great for streaming from internal sources like airplay, but everything else is a bit of a no no.

There are so many problems with DAB that it's probably best to stick to FM if possible.
Poor reception, drop outs, low bit rates and only mono transmission from most stations. The net streaming is just about as bad too !

can this be used as an alarm clock?

Great radio

Would John Lewis match this price given it requires a voucher?

If not and you prefer John Lewis then I guess they'd price match Go Electrical for only £3 extra with the benefit of a 2 year warranty - http://www.go-electrical.co.uk/roberts-stream-93i-dab-and-wifi-radio-black.html?gclid=CjwKEAiAiZK1BRD509nPsYiUk2YSJAAMoAwCrrbfRM5ZGbPjdXiC832H7thxcVu81TuYGE0-iQa_4xoC7fvw_wcB

Haha brilliant, thanks for clarifying :smiley:

Ha Ignore what I said before as I have decided to see if it would change and I didn't notice a 'day light saving on/off' option before and yup its correct now.

It might just be a bug and a new update might fix it.

​Haha sounds like me with my car radio! Thanks for the info, will check immediately whether there's any issues with the clock setting when it arrives.

I did when manually changing it but then it just stayed on 1hr ahead but not long to go till March.

​Is it possible to manually change it?

I have this and its a nice little radio but I have it on top of the fridge in kitchen. The clock hasn't changed so still appears 1hr ahead also tried manually but nothing. I stream songs from my phone to it with all the bass up and its surprisingly good for the size. The system does freez on occasions and have to disconnect. Not gonna lie I have had mine about 6months and still get confused with the buttons haha and get annoyed.

Not sure if this is a good thing for me, another thing to teach him how to use :stuck_out_tongue:

Great to know, thanks! :smiley:

This is an excellent radio. You can get an app to control it from your phone or tablet too.