Sangean WFR-20 WiFi Internet Radio & Media Player
by Sangean
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Digital Cameras Photo Reviews of Sangean WFR-20 WiFi Internet Radio & Media Player
Customer Review: Sealed box to BBC in 5 minutes or less
Summary: 4 Stars
Its already been accurately said; Sealed FedEx box to listening to the BBC in 5 minutes or less. In 10 minutes I'd checked out a few Irish FM stations and some beautiful bluegrass music.
My earliest memories of radio are of listening to my dad talking to 'Eskimo's' on shortwave radio and the shiver of a cold war. It took me years to understand that the artic wasn't like Disney and that igloos weren't melting all over their radios. Now both the war and ice sheets are thawing and the hobby of listening to the world via shortwave is drastically changing, if not also melting away.
The good news is Voice of Russia, Deutsche Welle (Germany), Swiss Radio, National Public Radio, WSM, and thousands of others are alive and well on the internet.
Here's what I've found out about the Sangean WRF-20:
Pros:
Its simple to operate for anybody who's ever opened a file folder on a computer; very Intuitive.
Breaking news in a country or town, you might be able to tune in to their local news and get it first hand.
Have you ever listened to traditional music from China? Rock from the Netherlands or Belgium? The defiance of Cuba? Heres your chance.
It's smaller than picture looks, and a handsome unit
I've read reviews complaining about too few buttons. If 1 works, and 1 does, 2 would be too many. Zen baby.
I really like the remote, though it's small and could be trouble for a home with kids and a playful puppy. I'll eventually look for a 2nd unit knowing I'll do something stupid to this one.
Its very easy to operate in the dark with phones on, not disturbing your mate.
The clock is huge and easy to read, the sleep timer is excellent. I haven't tried the on-off timers but they look simple and highly customable, if thats a word.
I haven't hit a function I couldn't do with the remote, I'm not aware of any but others may. Perhaps functions related to Reciva setup.
I have a friend with a $49.95 XM receiver; I paid $250.00 for Sangean. He pays a $15.00 a month subscription, I pay $ZI.PP. (We both pay monthly broadband Internet service) He has 160 channels; I have at least 2500 to 10,000. Some of his channels are commercial free, dedicated channels; some of mine are too.
Sound: I'm used to shortwave radio; this is beautiful! I'll let the audiophiles review this aspect.
Cons:
12 presets, only slightly more than the am radio in a 1967 Volkswagon Bug. I want 100!
The headphone jack is in the back. This makes it look pretty, but makes you fumble in the dark n dust to plug in the phones. Or dust! (my wife's suggestion)
No clock when listening to the radio. Common with many good radios.
Some drawbacks are those of Reciva and web streaming, not the Sangean. Buffering is the new static and fading that shortwave and AM radio suffers. If it does it on your computer, it may do it on the Sangean. The Sangean's memory isn't competing with a My Kittens or Hawaiian Tropics screensaver. Personally I've been pleasantly surprised how little buffering I've had to deal with. Its not Sangean's fault you can't sort by language. And having too many stations is like having too much money; nice problem to have!
I give it 4 stars. Would go 4 1/2 if I could. Its not perfect, but its great fun. Its a small world after all.
Minus my beloved hams and shortwave pirates, it's the new shortwave radio. Enjoy!
I'm now owned this radio for a couple months. I wouldn't change a thing I've said. I love this radio and play it daily, it's my primary radio, and I own many. I'm a proud freq. geek. I would like to add a few observations to my original review, here goes:
Whether it's the site Reciva or the radio itself, and I don't know which,there are occasions when you cannot access a genre or 'favorites' area of the radio. I've always been able to correct this by unplugging and replugging in the radio, essentially rebooting it. There is so much to listen to, I don't always do this, sometimes I just tune in something else. Theres sooooo much to listen to.
I love the alarms and timers. Highly customizable and very easy to do with the remote, very intuitive. For example, you can set it for Wednesday, 8:35am, Folk Alley, once or every Wednesday. You might want Tuesday set for everyday, 6pm, WSM. IT'S EASY!
You can easily add podcasts and live audio streams thru Reciva. It will automatically give you access to podcast archives, real sweet! There is a growing list of police scanner feeds for some major (and minor) cities that will stream too. NYC, LA, Edmonton to name a few.
Not to plug Logitech, but I added a $40.00 set of Logitech computer speakers to this radio and the already good sound is incredible! 2 built in speakers in the Sangean, 2 satillite speakers with 2 speakers in each, and a subwoofer. Nirvana! Full range sound! If ya got a few dollars left over, this really enhances the music. There are $20.00 speakers, I've heard them, they're not impressive. These are. They'll work on your computer and ipod too, very versitile. I've got about $300.00 in the system, I feel its worth more.
Buy this radio. Buy the extra speakers if you can. ITS FUN!
Customer 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.
Customer 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.
Customer Review: Solid, Well-built, Intuitive / but unreliable
Summary: 4 Stars
UPDATE: I gave this 5 stars shorty after purchasing. However, I must downgrade it because it is somewhat unreliable and slow to start and tedious to search and too limited in making pre-sets.
RADIO ALARM - IT'S NOT: If you think this is an ideal radio alarm clock, don't bet on it to work when you have to have it. There are any number of times I've turned it on, and forgotten I turned it on (went to do something else), only to discover an hour or two or five later that it had never connected at all -- was dead.
One CAN use the buzzer alarm (very effective) assuming one can connect to Internet to sync time automatically or manually set current time. That function does not require connection to Internet and the alarm will get you up (starts gently and gets to bone-rattling sound after a minute or two, if that's what it takes)!
Right now, I am trying again and again to connect but failing. I have it connected by cable directly to my router so as to avoid weakened wireless signal (has to go through a floor and a wall). I have fine wired Internet connection as I write -- NO radio. I've been trying for 15 minutes.
CONTROL: I had stopped using the knob in favor of the remote, which is generally nicer to use. But for scrolling through stations, the knob is definitely the thing to use. But there are too few presets, as others have noted. It takes a lot of searching to find anything of interest (95% of stations are of zero interest and many stations never connect anyway).
There are only 6 button-accessed presets and 6 more presets available with some extra scrolling/button pushing. That is too few. I end up, as a result, NOT searching anymore and just listen to the first 6, more or less.
The Sangean Wi-Fi Internet Radio is a pleasure to use, especially compared to the more expensive $300 C Crane Internet Radio that I bought 2 years ago.
The radio is very nicely, solidly built, which does not come through in the picture shown here.
But the main thing is the fast, easy function of the dial control through which all selections are made. At first I worried that the ONLY moving part was the dial. How could there be no buttons or other controls? Surely this radio would be hard to use? But absolutely not! Instead the dial is a VERY fast way to navigate. You can just fly through station selections to the ones you want to try.
The sound is just fine and there is an option to output to better speakers anyway.
There are options to connect to your PC's music, if you want.
The clock font is very nice, though it does not display (near as I can tell) until you turn the radio off, unfortunately.
The alarm starts too softly but gradually increases. Once you awaken, you will then select Y/N to connect. This is the only real oddity, I think. If you want a radio alarm, you want to awaken to radio, not a little buzzer and a screen choice to connect. Strange.
Important to me, the back light level is controllable so at night you won't have to shield the display to shut off otherwise excessive night light. The C Crane was bright enough to provide 3 night lights. I had retrofit it to shield the LED glare.
And the price is just right, I think. This is money well spent for those who want to explore the world of Internet radio.
Customer Review: A good quality radio
Summary: 5 Stars
I have just recently purchased a Sangean WFR-20. Here are my initial thoughts. (I will update this posting with additional information, if necessary).
Sound Quality: Good dynamic response for such a small unit, at both low and high volume levels. The unit has a reflex port on the rear which boosts the bass. There is also a noticeably good stereo separation on high bit-rate streams (e.g Radio Paradise).
Build Quality: Heavy duty case**, very solid and sturdy construction. My only minor criticism is that the 'tuning' knob is slightly wobbly, and taints an otherwise robust design.
Software Quality: The radio uses the Reciva software. This is reliable, but seems a tad buggy. For example, when attempting to load "My Stations" while simultaneously listening to a Podcast, it displays a menu load error; Of course, this is not a fault of the WFR-20 itself, and I am certain that firmware quirks like this will eventually be resolved by future `online' firmware upgrades. The Reciva website is easy to use, and I had no problem registering and setting up my radio's station, stream and podcast lists. The Reciva forums are also a good source of information, for example if you have questions regarding setup, connection to Premium streams etc ...
Usability: I found the navigation of the menu system to be straight-forward, using either the `tuning' knob or the remote control. The instructions are almost redundant because the menu system is quite intuitive. The three line display is sufficient to browse station/tracks lists and the horizontal scrolling feature effectively allows long track names to be displayed. That said, I am aware that some less tech-savvy users might disagree with this analysis; the radio's features are not quite as simple as a normal table-top FM/DAB unit, and the display is not what I would consider to be large, or crystal clear. So beware if your fingers are a little stiff, or your eyesight is a little tired,
Connectivity: I had no problems setting up the WFR-20, on our home network. I use a WRT54G Linksys with WEP in B/G mixed mode. After initial configuration I was able to instantly access, browse and play Internet Radio stations and access my WAV encoded music library (Twonkymedia on an NSLU2).
Cost: The WFR-20 is what I would consider to be an expensive unit, when compared to other Reciva based radios. Shop around, because you may find a bargain!
Conclusion:
I am very happy with the WFR-20. It provides me the access to the BBC listen again/on demand streams, which is the primary reason for the purchase. While expensive, the sound quality is better than I expected and the unit has a definite quality feel ... reminiscent of early transistor radios in Bakelite cases! I would recommend the WFR-20 as a good WiFi table-top radio, with any caveats previously mentioned. Internet Radio is still in its early stages, and I would consider this to be a great table-top radio to enjoy the new technology!
** Regarding the case material: I believed this to be plastic when I first wrote the review, however I stand corrected! (Please see first comment). 11/22/07