- Access over 10,000 radio stations world wide using the existing Wi-Fi or Broadband connection on your Mac or PC
- Features: CD Player with Gracenote Music Recognition Service, USB Port, SD Card Slot, FM Radio, Clock, Alarm, and Sleep Timer so you can wake up to your favorite tunes
- Includes LAN Cable Connection, 3.5mm auxiliary input jack for MP3 Players, and a 3.5 mm headphone jack for your favorite head gear or home stereo system
- Full Function Remote and 2, 20W speakers produce crisp dynamic sound quality
- Supports Real Audio, MP3, and WMA formats.
Pros:
Handsome looking. The shiny black looked very nice on my bookshelf in the living room.
Fairly simple interface (took a long time to figure out the "back" button) and remote control
Capacitive front panel was a nice touch and made a clean interface.
Nice small unit doesn't take up much space.
Interesting ability to get radio stations from around the world (listened to one from China for a while). Also can pull in some NOAA weather stations.
Speakers/sound was fine. Its not Bose quality, but its better than PC speaker quality. Its what I expected in this price range.
Cons:
CD made a dragging, hissing sound while the CD was spinning. I could "drown it out" with volume, but why should I? And is it scratching my CDs?
CD also skipped the end of tracks about 50% of the tracks on multiple CDs. Might have been related to the dragging sound, but it was always the end of tracks (on a couple CDs). Wasn't skipping like a scratched CD, just jumped to the end of the track for some reason. This is the main reason I returned this unit.
Capacitive touch front panel was not very sensitive. I normally had to hit it 2-3 times to get it to do anything.
LEDs brightened and dimmed with user interaction, but the timeout was so fast, it kept going on and off if you were scrolling or going through a menu...More annoying than anything.
Radio station selection wasn't great. Limited to radiostationworld.com and shoutcast.com, but couldn't get all the radio stations on the CIR2000 that are listed on the web either. Most of the US stations are various versions of NPR (40%?), so that really limits variety. No Pandora either.
SD reader could not use my 4GB cards. It did for the 32MB card, but I didn't have anything in between, so I don't know where the cut-off is located. It did play music off the USB well. I wanted to load MP3s in a SD card and it should handle at least 4GB for that.
Conclusion:
If the SD reader handled larger cards and the CD player worked right, I'd give it 3 stars. Add more radio stations (or even better, handle Android Apps), this would be a 4 star (5 with Android) product.We are very pleased with this product. You can play music from an sd card or directly stream from your computer. You can locate virtually any station broadcasting via the internet. It was easy and intuitive to set up. I do not recommend using the user manual however...the flowcharts are misleading. The sound quality is very good considering the unit's small size. I am able to access radio stations around the world. If you were a shortwave lover in your youth, you'll love this modern version.
Again, Amazon delivery was quick and product arrived in perfect condition.A reasonable value. Appearance is good...CD feature is a plus. Sound quality is OK...The set-up was not seamless; some patience is required. The remote is important because the front panel is dificult to read. My only real complaint (minor) is the limited number of "stations" in their system. For example, I could not find "Show Tunes" (Broadway musicals etc) in their genre list and in some other genre categories choices were there but limited.Well worth the money and the only unit of it's kind which incorporates an Internet Radio in it as well as a read capability for flash drives which appears to have no limitations as to number of files on the media it will recognize.
This item has been discontinued and I feel fortunate to have gotten one. The comparable models by Sony, etc all are limited to about 2500 titles (files) for recorded media and that is a real downer for me.
Update 3/17/2012.
Continue to think it is a fabulous value, especially now that it is available for $109.00 inc shipping. I bought my second one for a vacation home. Once again I searched for an alternative because i believed this unit was unavailable due to it being discontinued by Coby. There is NOTHING out there which comes close to the capabilities of this unit.
Primarily I use it to stream Internet music and play from flash drives and it handles both without a problem. The fidelity is ok for a unit its size and if you are looking for hi end sound you won't find it in a unit selling for just over $100 anyway.
It is always possible to direct wire the unit to an amp and then on to other speakers if you wanted a more serious sound. Even with the cost of an amp this would still be a good value based on all it can do.
Solid 5 stars
The controls were very slow to respond, so I would end up trying to do something and then canceling the operation by pressing the button twice. Most of the time, I couldn't get the lighted touch controls on the front to respond at all.
The front panel was way too bright. It also displayed only what was playing, when most of the time I wanted to display the time. The volume control jumped too far at low volumes. It was either inaudible or too loud. The remote buttons were tiny and dark. They also didn't seem to do anything much of the time.
It sounded great, though. Everything actually worked. It found my wireless internet connection with no problem and played music stored on all of the various media. It would make a great console set, but as an alarm, it was alarmingly complex to set up. I liked the idea of being able to use all the different media instead of just radio/cd/iPod. I don't have an iPod and don't really want to get one until I'm forced into it. I ended up with a Sony Dream Machine.
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