Post by dcolver on Jan 27, 2015 0:07:00 GMT
Scarcely high end, I know, but I imagine quite a few of us have second systems in kitchens, bedrooms etc and I am interested to know what is recommendable for casual radio, both live and On Demand / Listen Again / iPlayer streams of programmes you have missed.
My current solution to this need is an internet radio made by Acoustic Energy, which also makes loudspeakers. It's a small Linux computer dressed up as a radio. It has presets that can be directed to the BBC radio streams, and can also play what it calls On Demand broadcasts. It sounds little better than a moderate quality portable radio, but it's not actively horrible.
I use it quite a bit and it works well, but it relies on the BBC including WMA (Windows audio) among the standards that it supports, and in a few weeks that will cease to be the case. So I thought I'd switch to using an Apple iPod touch or iPad mini, running the iPlayer Radio app, as a front end to some bluetooth or Airplay speaker, perhaps with a DAB tuner it so that listening live, which will represent most of the use, could be done without the iPod/iPad. An alternative approach to the same issue is that Bose and Cambridge Audio make Airplay devices that have presets, so can serve as radios without a separate device. (Airplay is an Apple standard for having one device tell another what music to play over wifi, so that there is less compression, and less for the controlling device to do, so better battery life, than using a Bluetooth link.)
A visit to the shops on Saturday found little that sounded pleasing. Most of them added so much artificial bass that a Desert Island Discs podcast made Kirsty Young sound like a hirsute heavyweight wrestler. This eliminated the otherwise pleasing Sony X9, which ran rings round the Naim Muso. The best I found was by Klipsch, for less than half the price of the most expensive. I began to wonder whether I would get better results out of a bluetooth / DAB receiver, if one existed, that could power some modest separate speakers.
Grateful to know how others attack this problem.
My current solution to this need is an internet radio made by Acoustic Energy, which also makes loudspeakers. It's a small Linux computer dressed up as a radio. It has presets that can be directed to the BBC radio streams, and can also play what it calls On Demand broadcasts. It sounds little better than a moderate quality portable radio, but it's not actively horrible.
I use it quite a bit and it works well, but it relies on the BBC including WMA (Windows audio) among the standards that it supports, and in a few weeks that will cease to be the case. So I thought I'd switch to using an Apple iPod touch or iPad mini, running the iPlayer Radio app, as a front end to some bluetooth or Airplay speaker, perhaps with a DAB tuner it so that listening live, which will represent most of the use, could be done without the iPod/iPad. An alternative approach to the same issue is that Bose and Cambridge Audio make Airplay devices that have presets, so can serve as radios without a separate device. (Airplay is an Apple standard for having one device tell another what music to play over wifi, so that there is less compression, and less for the controlling device to do, so better battery life, than using a Bluetooth link.)
A visit to the shops on Saturday found little that sounded pleasing. Most of them added so much artificial bass that a Desert Island Discs podcast made Kirsty Young sound like a hirsute heavyweight wrestler. This eliminated the otherwise pleasing Sony X9, which ran rings round the Naim Muso. The best I found was by Klipsch, for less than half the price of the most expensive. I began to wonder whether I would get better results out of a bluetooth / DAB receiver, if one existed, that could power some modest separate speakers.
Grateful to know how others attack this problem.