Tony Grant
My sister has asked me for advice on purchasing a new radio. She would like one that’s of good quality, sound-wise, to listen to music, with its own indoor aerial, and preferably portable and capable of battery operation. She was recently without power due to Storm Ophelia, but managed to catch up with things on a friend’s radio at their place. So she thinks it’s time she got one of her own.
Me, I listen in the car or via the TV channels, so haven’t listened to the radio in the house for many a long year. And I’m sure whoever comes up with the best idea will be dubbed the ‘Cat’s Whiskers’.
Thought I’d better get that one in first!
Pat Heigham
I can recommend Roberts RD21. FM/DAB, mains or battery powered (6 x D cells). Several preset buttons, and excellent sound quality.
Or look at the Pure range. Some, I think, offer a card recording facility, to play back later.
I’m looking for a small portable radio for travelling. I found two possibles, not stereo except on headphones: Sony XDR – P1DBP or Pure Pop mini (there are other models in the Pure range).
If your sister is within reach of a Currys/PC World, go and have a mosey, then buy it via Amazon, unless Currys/PC offer a better deal!
My bedside radio is a Panasonic, but with failing hearing, I would wish for a better top-end tweakability, so mostly I listen on cans – but like yourself, use the Freeview system for live radio – pissed off that I cannot get BBC Radio on iPlayer via Freeview, only on computer, which is fine if I’m staying with friends, as my laptop is on the bedside table!
(My usual travelling radio is Sony ICF-SW7600 but it doesn’t do DAB!)
Peter Cook
I inherited a Pure DAB radio from my late father. It was rubbish. Counter intuitive to tune, woolly sound and worst of all when it was about 4 years old, the plastic casing suddenly became soft and sticky. Having had a similar experience with a Veho scanner I binned it.
Freeview TV or iPlayer work if handy, but a Panasonic compact unit in the kitchen is the most used audio unit in the house, with CD, USB, cassette and no DAB – and will continue until FM expires.
Graeme Wall
I’d agree that the Pure’s are counter – intuitive. I had a Pure clock – radio alarm. A pig to set up, the so-called instructions are actually completely wrong in a couple of places. When the radio comes on you lose the time display and there’s no way of over-riding it. Also I’ve never successfully got the snooze to work. Waste of money.
Terry Meadowcroft
My daughter has a Pure Evoke 1S which is a bonny little sweet-sounding DAB (though NOT DAB-X though in the UK there are very few DAB-X broadcasts) and I took a shine to it when staying with her recently.
Since then I have supplied several family members (including myself) with these, ex-eBay, and I really like them. They also take a battery pack for picnics, which uses 18650 Lithium batteries, which charge up when the radio is plugged in at home, and run for about 8 hours.
I have bought nine Pure Evoke 1S from eBay, most of which were purchased for a song because they had faults. Most of them had PSU problems, easily fixed. The Evoke 1S (the type number, both-1 and -S is important) have great wooden cabinets which are attractive to my eye, and I have seen no examples of sticky plastic. In fact, all the cabinets were in really good order, and although I bought them cheaply because of the faults, only one was unrepairable (cost me £19 and makes a decent door stop) and the rest were easily put right.
Pure are a very reputable company; my first ‘hi-fi’ style DAB radio from many years ago was a Pure DRX-701ES and has worked faultlessly for years (and still is), and very highly specified, and their portable radios are also well designed and built.
The sound of the 1S speaker is not Hi-Fi, but easy on the ear and if you feed the output to a good stereo amp and speakers, is, as DAB goes, good indeed. (It also has FM).
Counter intuitive tuning, yes, maybe, but soon learned, and if my 42 year old non-technical daughter, who loves hers, is anything to go by, the logic of the thing soon clicks in! I muttered oaths at the Evoke 1S at first! But it turned out to be a good radio after a while.
Keith Wicks
The most popular ways of dealing with sticky plastic appear to be wiping with isopropyl alcohol or with a baking powder paste.
I’ve not tried this yet, but have been looking on the internet for remedies as I have a cordless drill with a very sticky handle.
I’ve read that it is just an applied coating that gets sticky.
Martin Dilly
A friend has a Fiat Multipla in which a lot of the plastic of the instrument panel went tacky. We found a gentle wipe with acetone cleared it up and left the plastic intact.
John Howell
There is another make that I have only recently heard of: Majority Radios.
They seem reasonably priced and have a good selection, and, wait for it, they’re Made in England! I bought a portable, a ‘Romsey’ about the size of a packet of 10 cigs. The sound quality was, understandably, appalling from its little loudspeaker, but the stereo from the headphone socket was excellent. So it may be worth looking at their larger models. If battery power is needed look for one with lithium-ion rechargeable cells, 8 ‘D’ cells cost £16 in Sainsburys!
What ever you do get your sister to listen to a few sets before making a decision.
I have no link with this firm, just a happy customer.
Dave Plowman
I’d be surprised if it were “Made in England”. . Possibly partially assembled in the UK – but I’ll bet the ‘guts’ come ready made from the Far East. Roberts etc have been doing this for years.
Ideally, I’d go for a portable that uses re-chargeable batteries so it charges up when you have mains and runs off the batteries when not. With a decent Li-Ion etc battery, which have come down in price dramatically recently. Maybe down to vaping. You can buy a couple of 2.5 amp hour 3.7v
18650 cells (about twice the size of an AA) for about a tenner these days.
Modern portables – especially DAB – can cost rather a lot to run on disposable batteries. And old folk like me don’t like wasting money on those.
Pat Heigham
Always useful to have reports of personal knowledge.
I have no experience of Pure range, but “Radio Times” gives them away to the best listener’s letter each week.
Maybe they got a duff lot?!
But the Roberts portable is well OK.
My requirement for DAB is to receive Radio 4Extra, used to be R7, as I like the repeats of comedy shows. Trouble is, they have repeats about 3 times in a 24 hour period. OK if you are out during the day, but for an old retired fart like me, I’ve heard it already! I call it lazy scheduling, lack of inspiration, or planning or thought.
I remember a radio play involving a space exploration of some long lasting journey, where the diary of one crew member mentioned that the ‘music tapes’ lasted for eight days before repeating. Think that R4Extra schedulers must have listened to that one!
Dave Mundy
Here are two very similar looking ones, the Evoke sounds terrific but is obsolete apart from E-bay.
(Click on the pictures below to see a larger or clearer version of the picture:
Click the “X” button (top right) to close the newly opened picture.)
Majority Girton
Pure Evoke – 2
Terry Meadowcroft
That’s the Evoke 2xt which isn’t as pretty, or technically good as the 1S. Later versions of the 1S (from the one whose serial number middle letters are ‘LG’) has a useful sleep timer, but loses the ‘outline’ time display which looked good. USB updates are easy to apply from the Pure updates site.
Dave Plowman
Even living in central London, I’ve never had a portable radio that works perfectly. Except in AM days. Bit the same as a TV with set top aerial. The signal comes and goes as people move around the room – or whatever.
Terry Meadowcroft
All I can say is that I live in the wilds of North Yorkshire, 30 miles plus from the nearest big town (Scarborough, York, Middlesbrough) and not on top of a hill, and the Pure Evoke 1S radio finds 30+ interference-free stations with aerial extended. The one in my son’s bedroom, admittedly upstairs, he normally uses with its aerial not fully extended (search me why); he has a big choice of stations, as we do in all rooms of my home, and, although I know DAB isn’t the bees knees for super HI FI quality as it is all more or less compressed, we are burble-free all over the house.
In the kitchen, the useful 3.5mm jack outputs on the back of the set (one line, before volume control, and the other headphone, choose which), give excellent quality (in DAB terms) fed through a decent digital 100 watt amp and Rogers dB101 monitor loudspeakers (which are pretty respectable if you don’t mind the looks). I use the headphone o/p so I can control the volume with the pot on the radio. The pots. on the radios are of good quality – no scratchy noises from any of the 9 examples I have distributed through the family.
They really are good. Their Achilles’ Heel is the ‘wall wart’ PSU whose capacitors go NG and the PSU can’t provide the required power. With the aid of a vice, using care, the PSU can be opened and the three electrolytics replaced. Otherwise 6v. 2A. supplies are available cheaply (beware that Evoke models other than the 1S may require different volts). Keep the input plug to the radio you may need it to graft onto the PSU you buy – it’s an odd (ish) size.
The Pure Evoke 1S is not upgradeable to receive anything but Pure silence from DAB+ transmission, however, as far as transmissions up here are concerned, only two or three stations have taken to transmitting in DAB+ format (what is the advantage of DAB+ over DAB? Takes up less bandwidth so higher bit rates can be more cheaply achieved? Must find out.
Dave Plowman
That might be the answer. Living well away from possible sources of interference. I don’t actually have a DAB portable here – I was basing my comments more on FM and the moans from a neighbour about DAB on their kitchen radio.
I have permanent audio installations in every room here, fed from central tuners. I now used Freeview for that. Came about through being on the wrong side of the hill for FM reception when I first moved here many years ago.
Dave Mundy
The picture was one from eBay: my own Evoke is a plain ‘2’ and Pure tell me that it is too old to be updated! I have managed to update my Pure ‘Highway’ to DAB+ from an internet download but it really needs a proper aerial and not the few inches of metal foil.
Dave Hunter
“Which” rates the John Lewis Sceptre Duo II highly: my daughter’s works well.
Geoff Hawkes
We’ve had a Grundig Concert Boy for the last 45 years. It was our first FM radio and I was impressed with the sound quality right from the start. One of the first things we listened to was a dramatisation of Conan Doyle’s “The Lost World” and I remember wondering what was the crackling noise I could hear, thinking it was a fault until I realised that it was the sound of the fire that the explorers had lit in their camp. Music sounds very good on it too as the name implies. That it’s still in use today is thanks to a good technician in a local shop but it is undeniably in the last stages its of life, so I’ve been looking around for a replacement when the day arrives. The radio has become the “rod, pole and perch” for what I expect from other portables and I’ve been disappointed by many of those around today.
I was looking for one to go on a high shelf in our kitchen and apart from good sound quality, needed the display and most of the controls to be front facing.
Having considered what’s on offer, the ones I favour are the Revo Super Signal or the SuperConnect (10W and 15W respectively) or the Ruark R1 Mk3 (9W). The sound output of these is good, as is the OLED display and the controls. None of these are particularly cheap but seem to be worth the money, though that depends on what you’re prepared to spend. Appearance may be a factor too but after a while I think it becomes less important than what goes in through the ears.
Of course it’s a subjective choice and what you or I like, your sister may not. One further point, I’ve been told that DAB radios get through batteries very quickly because of the power needed to convert the digital signal. How true that is, I don’t know but I would always go for a mains or main/battery model if I could as the batteries always run out at the wrong time, for which I blame the good Mr Murphy whose law dictates it,
Hope this helps,
Dave Mundy
I got my Evoke 2, without a plug-in power supply, when helping to clear a deceased colleagues’ workshop. I thought I had a suitable plug-in DC PS and hoped it would ‘do’. Wrong! It was only 9v. 300 mA. and the radio motor-boated big-time! I bit the bullet and ordered the Pure PS for the Evoke and found that it was rated at 9v.1500mA.! So, yes, batteries won’t last long.
Terry Meadowcroft
About 8 hours. A pack of 18650 lithium batteries has lots of capacity.
Bernie Newnham
Last Christmas my daughter bought me an Amazon Echo –
“Alexa, play Classic FM / Radio 4 / Extra”
“Alexa, tell me the news” “Here is your flash briefing from BBC News…..”
“Alexa, tea, Earl Grey, hot” ” I am not a replicator”
It isn’t hifi, at least, not on the mini version, but it is easy.
Graham Maunder
I bought my wife the new Amazon Echo and I really can’t recommend it enough.
The sound quality is great for it’s size and you can just ask it to play any radio station (from around the world) plus you get the benefit of being able to ask it traffic news, weather etc etc. If you have Spotify or similar you can even access playlists. My Grandson currently finds it amusing asking “Alexa” to play Christmas music!
It even tells jokes to rival any on here!
Just a thought – at £99 it’s pretty good.
Doug Puddifoot
I have the Dot, and have just ordered a second one. Sound is OK for its size, and there is a 3.5mm line out or Bluetooth if you want better quality
