- Listen directly from a wireless router and broadband without PC or Mac
- 15,000+ radio stations from around the worldover 280 locations and 67 genres, 20,000 on demand streams and Podcast
- Genres include rock, rap, alternative, talk, news, oldies, top 40 and more
- Free Pandora radio streaming with access to personalized playlists
- Sirius Internet radio capabilitiesview artist name and song title
Both radio's have completely locked up now and won't even turn on. I submitted multiple requests to Grace support online and they never responded. That being the case I would never purchase a Grace product again.
*I'm usually very sceptical of reviews who rate products low and will always look around to see if this was just a one off product problem or someone who dislikes a company. As noted I had two radios that both died with the same problem with absolutely no support from Grace.
Second Update(2012):
I originally rated this radio a 5 star and now have lowered it to a 2 star.
Issues: BOTH radios over a few days or a few weeks start and develop weird characters all over the small screen that makes the unit unusable without removing the power at the back and resetting the unit. Once that's done the unit is back to normal. This happens randomly all the time now. I've tried firmware updates and nothing has changed. I will update the review with a screen shot shortly.
A few radio stations changed their format online and still stream audio that works on other devices and PCs. I go to the Grace Reciva website and the stations all check out normal and show functioning normal. I bring them up on both radios and neither radio works on these stations now. They both get caught in a loop saying "Connecting", "Retrying", "Connecting", "Retrying" and so on and so on. Most of the time I now find it easier to get an old IPHONE, set it to Wifi and sit it in speaker docking station. That works with all radio stations and I know every time I touch the screen it's on and ready to go.
*If Grace fixed the 2 problems above I would rate the unit a 5 star but right now the units just sit gathering dust. I would high recommend not purchasing any version of this radio until Grace figures out the problems. I'm sure both are software related. *
UPDATE(2010): I was so happy with my first IR2000 I purchaced another one for home.
Original Review(2009): I originally rated this radio a 5 star
This is a great radio. I've owned it for nearly a week now and it's worked flawlessly. I was looking for a radio for my desk at work and I couldn't have made a better choice. Over the past few weeks I read every review I could find about every internet radio on the market. I finally decided on this one. I really love it. The sound is great but don't expect to be using it on full volume to cover your entire house. Here is my list of likes and dislikes and I hope it helps.
Like's:
The size was perfect for my desk
It looks very stylish
I fired up the radio and had it working within minutes without reading the manual
It was very easy to register at and automatically download my radio stations and streams.
I added some personal streams and they appeared on the screen of the radio within minutes.
It was very easy to browse stations around the world without the use of my account.
The Audio sounded really good. Especially for the size of the radio
WIFI setup was very simple. I moved it from one network to another and it remembered both password keys (WEP & WPA)
The signal strength was really good especially with an internal antenna
Navigation on the screen was very simple.
When available it scrolled song or audio information across the screen. E.g. I tuned into aircraft traffic control after I added it to own streams after finding in on a website and within minutes weather information was scrolling across the screen.
The remote is simple to use
External input for an MP3 player, etc is a great addition
It can stream audio from just about anywhere.....Radio Station Streams, Pandora, Sirius, Your PC, any MP3/REAL Audio/WMA stream off the net....
Dislike's:
The headphone jack is on the back. I use my headphone a lot and it's a pain having to pull the radio forward each time I want to plug them in. Some people may find it useful to plug other input devices in the front and others may find it useful to leave their stero plugged into the rear headphone port. Their should be an Aux (External) input on the front and back, and there should also be a headphone output jack on the front and back. That would accommodate every possible scenario.
Although it's good that the radio is light, it tends to slide a little when I press the select button at times.
I looked at the manual after I got everything working and it's laid out OK. They could lay it out just a little better.
Conclusion.
The radio is well worth the money. It's very easy to use and setup. The sound is great. The menus are easy to use. It's built well. In all it's a fantastic radio. If I were purchase another radio for my desk, beside my bed or on a table in the lounge room, I would buy another one of these for sure. In fact, I'm thinking about it right now. I give this one 5/5.
Buy Grace Digital Wireless Internet Radio with remote (white) Now
This review is for the Grace GDI-IR1000 or GDI-IR2000 internet radio. This product is an updated version of the ITC-IR1000. The only difference between toe 1000 and 2000 is that the 2000 has a remote control.Network setup was relatively straightforward. I don't normally broadcast my SSID, and I use MAC address filtering, so before scanning for my network I turned SSID broadcast on and disabled MAC filtering. Once I acquired the network I found the radio's MAC address and added it to my allowed devices and turned off SSID broadcast again.
The manual has you connect to where you can register your radio, add stations to your list or set up Pandora. Once you've registered you'll have access to your stations and Pandora directly from the radio. It usually takes about 15 minutes for your radio to be recognized and access your lists. You can also directly access all 15,000 plus radio stations directly from the radio.
Pandora is the icing on the cake for this radio. Once you're registered you can add artists or songs and get customized playlists of similar material. You can select an individual artist to create a playlist from or you can choose QuickMix, which will play selections from everything you choose from your list.
The radio now has 10 presets, using 5 preset buttons plus a shift button for the second 5. This is enough for my needs, but you can always access your favorite stations from the menu if you need more presets.
One surprise I got early on is that if the Reciva website is down, you won't receive any radio broadcasts. The clock also won't function. The upside is that once you configure your time zone the radio clock will synchronize with a network time server.
Audio quality is very good for a tabletop radio. It's certainly not hi fi quality, but nice for what the product is.
Labels on this radio are no longer a problem. They peel off easily in one piece.
Clock size, as mentioned by others is very small. It would be nice if there was a way to make the clock display larger when the radio isn't playing.
When I received my radio, as configured it took about a minute to connect to my network every time I turned it on, plus several seconds to acquire a station after one was selected. It also didn't remember the last station selected. I never found it in the manual, but under , Stay connected to wireless in standby needs to be set to yes. Now the radio only takes a couple seconds to acquire a station and it remembers the last station selected.
I'm very happy with this purchase.
Read Best Reviews of Grace Digital Wireless Internet Radio with remote (white) Here
This is a fantastic radio, I've owned it for just over a week, with noissues. I was very positively surprised with the audio quality
produced by the Grace GDI-IR2000. After going into
"Equalization", in the Settings Menu, adjusting the Treble and
Bass, the sound is amazing. Registering my Grace GDI-IR2000 at
Reciva.com was quick and easy. After setting up an account, I put
in the S/N and radio ID numbers of my radio, that are found in the
settings menu of the radio.
Pros:
Fantastic sound quality.
Had zero issues with connection to Internet
-Ten preset station buttons
Easy to use menus
Cons:
Clock too small, as a clock radio the numbers are only 1/4 the size of the full screen making it difficult to read at night, without my glasses. It would be better if the clock numbers filled the full screen area when in an inactive mode.
Want Grace Digital Wireless Internet Radio with remote (white) Discount?
I was very disappointed with this device, would not connect to the Internet (on my network, or even another separate network I tried for troubleshooting), and Grace support is really just terrible.Right out of the box I was able to connect to my router, but no matter what I tried the radio would not connect to the Internet/reciva servers. My first instinct was to check the manual, but there are absolutely no descriptions of any of the error messages or what they mean.
I then tried checking their support website. No knowledge base of any kind, just a forum (which isn't search-able by the way) with many issues and very few answers. In fact, many of the requests for support posted on the forum were unanswered for weeks.
I eventually found some firmware related fixes for the connection error I was getting, apparently there are quite a few known firmware bugs, but of course you can't update firmware if you can't connect to the Internet. This is where an Ethernet port would come in handy. Also, many users report that there are issues with WPA encryption and that they have better luck switching to WEP or turning off encryption. But really you shouldn't have to change your entire wireless network set-up just to get a silly radio to work as it should have to begin with. After exhausting all of the solutions I could find (that were reasonable), I emailed Grace support.
Their support line determined the radio would need to be sent in for repair... and that I would need to pay to ship my brand new radio to them for this to occur. Meh, the hassle just isn't worth it, and I returned to to Amazon for a refund.
I was looking for a web-based replacement for my Sirius home receiver, but I think I'll wait another year with hopes there are some better quality options in the future.
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