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My unit even arrived with instructions in French. Storing new stations on my Roku was impossible. There's a mint to be made by someone who can make a product like this work simply and provide customer support. The Roku Soundbridge is a great concept sold by a company with absolutely no support. I found that communication between Roku and my stereo system was difficult.
As expat news junkies, we love the ability to stay easily in touch with stateside news. Some have complained about Roku being slow, but I found that once I had a contact name from the Roku Forum, things went pretty smoothly, although it does take persistent followup.We're now on our third R1000, which appears to be an all-new one (the second was refurbed and had software issues in addition to a faulty power supply). The Freecom is an excellent product, but doesn't have the sound quality or more sophisticated interface that the R1000 offers.The reason we know so much about the competitors is that we've bought them all while waiting for the R1000 to be repaired due the faulty power supply.
Overall, it's still among the best, if not THE best, of all the popular internet radios. The Aluratek gets good reviews here, but it's clunky product with flawed functionality, a primitive interface and amateurish product design. We live in China and bought the R1000 Radio from Amazon in November 2007.
The Sangean is acceptable, but has a painfully slow interface. If Roku can get the quality issues under control (especially the power supply, which seems to be the top flaw), then the R1000 would easily be among the top choices in what is a growing field of options. For reasons I'll get to in a moment, we've tried several competitors, including Sangean, Aluratek and Freecom.
The Roku has very intuitive controls, excellent sound and a great physical design.
The clock set's itself from some time source on the internet but every few months the time automatically resets to something a few hours off the correct time. This change can occur any time thus causing the alarm to come on in the middle of the night or hours after your intended wake up time. I have used two of these radios for about a year and have had no hardware problems. It's as if the time zone was changed remotely. The time is easily fixed by unplugging and replugging in the radio to do a reset. Like everyone else I wish the menus were a little easier to use. My primary gripe is the clock.
The new unit also ran about 10 months before it too failed in the same way. Since it was still under warranty I was able to get a new unit. I will not be getting another one of these. The Soundbridge has good sound and worked well with my upnp setup for about 10 months. Then it stopped coming on.
The only option to turn off from the radio itself is a 10-minute sleep button. It has built in AM/FM and comes with antennas to maximize reception. The setup is a little complicated, but if you're patient and follow the instructions in the book and on the Roku website, you can easily program your radio from any computer on the network, or right from the radio itself. You can also turn on the radio remotely from any desktop on the network, and even outside the network through Roku's website. You don't need to have any computer on for this radio to work; it picks up your wireless network and works with it. This radio is a glimpse into our future.
The quality is as good as a Bose Wave radio. There's a remote control, and the one weird thing is that you can only turn off the Soundbridge with the remote. It allows me to tune in to any of tens of thousands of radio stations from around the world. It will also pick up you music libraries from i-Tunes and play them. It's a wonderful product. If we want Hawaiian music, or New Orleans Jazz or Africian rhythms, we can go right to the source of the music.
It has 18 pre-sets.
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