Acoustic Energy Wi-Fi Radio

There are many reasons why you might want a wireless network in your home – just take a look at our feature on page 40 to find out. One of the major draws is the thought of piping internet radio and your CD collection around your house – the holy grail of Wi-Fi connected music lovers. The main problem so far has been that most of the devices designed to do this have been far from satisfactory. This humbly named Wi-Fi Radio from British manufacturer Acoustic Energy (AE) could be the device to change all that.

Features
You could be forgiven for thinking there’s something missing from the packaging when you open it, as all you get is a small box, a lead to plug it into the wall and a small pamphlet with instructions. In fact, this is all you need – there’s no software to install onto your PC and no extra cables thanks to the Wi-Fi. Plug it into an electricity socket and it will connect to your broadband router, automatically download your radio stations from the internet and wait for you to pick one. If you’ve got a PC switched on with some MP3 or WMA files on it, it’ll play those too.

Performance
We’re big fans of DAB digital radios, but this device knocks their socks off. It has thousands of pre-set stations (AE suggests 10,000 – we didn’t count them) you can listen to from all over the world, with nearly 400 UK channels including most of the digital broadcasts. The device then has a built-in version of Windows Media Player so it can play MP3 and WMA files from your networked computers. If you have a lot of music on your PC it can take a while to scan a folder and build a catalogue of options. This device speeds that process up on subsequent visits, by writing a small file to the folder in question. This radio’s greatest weakness is its mono speaker, though it still produces extraordinarily good sound considering its size, and you can easily use the headphone socket to add better speakers to improve sound quality.

Ease of use
Setting up wireless devices always has the potential for trouble. In the case of this radio it took us a few minutes to get our heads around how we’d select our network and enter our security key (WEP and WPA standards are supported), but once we’d crossed that hurdle, everything just started to work. A single dial on the device does most of the selection work, though there are also a number of buttons for the usual functions such as play and pause.

Value for money
Although this Acoustic Energy model is twice the price of a regular digital radio, it has well over twice the functionality, not just because it will pick up an extraordinary number of stations, but because it’ll also stream music from your PC. While £200 is obviously a lot of money, we’re struggling to see how a serious music fan with a Wi-Fi network could be disappointed.