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: 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!
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: 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: Not as good as the Boom
Summary: 4 Stars
I've had the WFR-20 radio for 2 years and enjoyed it all along. However, I've purchased two logitech network radios (the radio and the boom) and would recommend the Boom over the WFR-20 for several reasons. The Sangean does look great, and sounds ok, and it works as-advertised. But the Boom does many things better than the Sangean. Here's some key points to consider:
Sound: the WFR20 doesn't have audio mixing options (treble/bass), the boom does, plus XL sound which is like virtual surround, and several other options. Plus, it sounds better. My speakers in the Sangean have blown! Granted, this was because my 2 year-old cranked up the volume for fun - so I take the blame, but the fact that they designed the levels and knob to allow this to happen so easily is annoying.
Controls: the sangean's design is sleek with the single continuous dial, but a lot is sacrificed for this from the user perspective. The remote is ok, but kind of a pain to rely on and awkward to use. The boom also has a remote but I seldom use that either. The "back" button and presets on the face of the boom are huge differentiators for me. It allows you to jump to things and surf internet stations much more easily.
Connectivity: the Boom just connects to the network promptly, where the sangean takes up to 30 seconds to load and play. Note lots of people make this observation in their reviews.
Compatibility: the Booms Squeezebox interface seems more intuitive and superior to the Recieva interface used by the Sangean. Plus Recieva has some technical limitations and can't accommodate Flash (I believe) based stations, whereas the Boom can. I've found several internet stations that fit this criteria and can't be added to the Sangean.
Favorites/presets: The Sangean does have 12 presets you can store, 6 auto dial on remote and 6 more you can store on a list. But that is it. The Boom has 6 presets on the face of the unit (a major plus for me!) and an unlimited 'favorites' list in the menu. This is a huge factor in storing lots of internet stations I want to return to at some point without searching for them.
Size: the boom actually takes up less space than the sangean, which.. even with the product dimensions, is hard to tell without having them side by side.
With all of this it's a no brainer that I'd buy the Boom first before the Sangean, but even with all of this, I do not regret buying the Sangean. It does look really cool and it works just fine, and at a fair price for what it offers. The Boom just has it beat on so many levels and is priced lower. I will say that the Boom is majorly due for a model update, as is the Sangean. The Boom's sister product, the logitech radio, has a nice color screen and a rechargeable battery (sold seperately), which I really love and will purchase when offered for the Boom. I hope it's soon!
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