The Sharper Image EC-B150 Premium Sound Soother

• Digital FM clock radio with gradual wake and snooze
• 20 Digitally mastered relaxing sounds. Helps you relax and fall asleep faster.
• Sounds Include; Aviary, Brook, City, Dockside, Ebb Tide, Everglades, Fireside, Foghorns, Heartbeat, North Woods, Oceanside, Rain, Rainforest, Roadside, Steam Train, Summer Night, Surf's Up, Thunderstorms, White Noise, Wind Chimes
• Extra large display with full sound titles
• Dual alarm with dual readouts makes setting alarm easy - wake to sounds or beep

Sharper Image EC-B150 Premium Sound Soother, Serial Nr. of this unit appears to be #2912. Although the stock item photo appears to show the top buttons surrounded by brushed silver backgound, the one I received is actually glossy black background with flat black selection buttons...just for what it's worth, it looks great either way. The unit as received has a tight, professional appearance, and looks very nice when installed.

The display is a backlit liquid crystal, visible by day but not overly obtrusive at nite. The intensity of the display is adjustable by a rear mounted 4 position slide switch (Off, L, M, H). Medium works great for me. Rear mounted as well is a slide switch that enables or disables onboard automatic time adjustment for Daylight savings time. The items displayed when the unit is done being set up make real sense; very large Time of Day, a very small icon showing alarm(s) that are set (along with an icon showing what will be the alarm type sounded), also the actually day name, and the date (short month name and day number)are shown.

This unit allows the user to listen to one sound by timer to go to sleep by, and a DIFFERENT sound (or FM radio or alarm) to wake up to. From what I have read, the previous models did not offer this.

The unit is fairly lightweight, but has non-skid feet that stop is from sliding around. There are a pair of small speakers mounted rear facing that provide the sound. I find if I position the unit a little ways away from the wall behind the headboard, the Sound Soother does a good job of filling the corner of the room with sound. Better yet would be to position the unit as you would a white noise generator, (across the room, not so close to the head of the bed).

Some of the sounds on this are better than others to me. Certain sounds are cyclical by nature and lend themselves to the fairly short loop that the unit uses (Surf's up, Ebb tide, Dockside,ect). Several sounds are very nice just because of their content; I like the distant rooster in Everglades for example, and Rainforest is nice as well. The wake up sounds come on low volume at first, and then becomes louder over several minutes which is another nice feature. The box mentions clock "AutoSet", and I do not know what they mean by this. I was required, as part of setup, to tell the unit the month, day, year, hour and minute, AM or PM; I didn't see anything automatic about the clock setup. The clock has options in it for setting the alarm to only operate during the week (M,T,W,Th,F) with one single toggle setting, a nice little option.

I'm happy with this purchase, and I think this model is a improvement over some of the earlier models. I have not used the digital FM radio included in this model, so I have no opinion on the radio portion of the machine.

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I bought this item as a tool in promoting sleep but this has not really worked out. It's very easy to use and that design is good,but the speakers are very poor and have a cheap old transistor radio sound. It's as if there is a little "white noise" in every setting.For $40 it seems Sharper Image could have included speakers that reproduced somewhat the real sound of the ocean or birds singing. The other major defect in design is that the "tracks" used in each setting are very short and this VERY irritating. When I'm trying to get to sleep I easily get "locked" into predicting the "next chime". The track repeats so soon that I begin to focus on it, when that is exactly what I'm trying to let go of. Also the "train" track sounds like a child's toy.

So please put a little more in to it. I'm giving my unit awayReally the price for this quality should be around $15.

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the multiple light settings for the face are nice, tho I keep it on the lowest one, since the others are so bright. I like the fact that it also gives you the day and date, as well as the time. The 20 sound settings are something else. What to choose? I think I like 'em all except for "white noise"...why have that when you have so many nice ones to pick from? And I like that if you use the sound as an alarm it starts off soft and gradually gets louder. So why only 4 stars? I was disappointed that the steam train sound didn't have a whistle to go along with the chuga-chuga. Maybe the next generation!....Oh I also liked the packaging. NO syrofoam, but a cardboard insert tray. Way to go!

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I have owned the earlier incarnation of this alarm clock for about 4 years. The sounds are great and the loops are, for the most part, well camouflaged. I have thoroughly enjoyed this except for a slightly too bright display and look to replace it only because white noise helps my baby boy to sleep, so he gets the old one.

However the build quality has clearly gone down since those bygone years (sic). And by this what I really mean is the speaker. I already returned one and had it replaced, only to find that the new one has exactly the same tinny buzz to the speaker. This was not at all the case with the older EC-B100. For a device that is designed specifically for its soothing sounds, I am astonished that speaker quality is where they would choose to cut corners.

For those that don't know it, Sharper Image went bankrupt 4 years ago and was bought out by a new set of investors. Three guesses what they have on their minds, and for sure 'quality' is not it. Very disappointed.

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After 30 days of use, the time display stopped functioning all together. The sound quality of the white noise was okay, but I expect better quality from Sharper Image. Fortunately, Amazon takes care of its customers, and they have sent me a replacement with two-day shipping. I will be interested to see if the replacement lasts longer.