Yesterday I bought my first internet radio, the Logik IR100. As it’s the first time I’ve even tried an internet radio I didn’t want to spend too much just in case I didn’t like it, I also wanted something small as it was to go by my bedside to be used as a radio alarm clock. I chose the Logik because it had fairly good reviews, I could pick one up locally from Currys
, it looked nice and was only £70. It’s one of the cheapest I found other than a Bush which was white and I didn’t like the look of it.
Setup was pretty straight forward, search for wireless network, select it, input the security key and that’s it, from there it connects to the Reciva servers and downloads all radio stations, and there are thousands of them. You can browse through the station list by country or genre. The radio only had the ability to store 5 presets for your favourite stations, not a lot when there are about 10,000 to choose from. It does overcome this problem slightly by having a “My Stuff” section. This works once you have registered an account on the Reciva website and also registered the radios serial number to your account. From the website you can browse/search through all the available stations, listen to them online and add them to your “My Stuff” folder. This list of favourite stations is then sent to the radio and they are all easily accessible from the menu. This makes it a lot easier than manually scrolling through thousands of stations on the radio.
Another nice feature which is also available from the website is podcasts. This works in a similar way but there are no lists to browse through, you have to know the rss feed of the podcast you want to add, these can easily be obtained from several sites such as www.podcastalley.com Once you enter the rss feed into your account page this too is sent over to your radio so that you can stream your favourite podcast whenever you like.
Finally it can also stream music from your PC. I have set this up and it works fine but it’s not something that I will use often, but for those that would use it it’s another nice feature.
It does have a few drawbacks but not many. It only has one speaker so no stereo, but saying that it does sound rather nice and is quite loud in a small/average size room. It’s perfect for a bedroom, kitchen or office, but using it as a music system for a party would be pushing it. And as there is no headphone port you can’t even plug in external speakers. The only other downside I have found so far is that when the radio is on you cant see what time it is, the time is only visible when it’s in standby, this only becomes an issue if its the only clock in the room which for me it isn’t so its no really an issue.
To conclude, the Logik IR100 is an amazing radio for the price as long as you’re not expecting it to fill a concert hall or play music loud in one room while you listen it in another.
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