Logitech Squeezebox Radio (Red)

The Squeezebox is a great little internet radio. Looks great, clean design. Great sound for such a small unit! The ability to network and control is very handy - as I'm typing this on my laptop in the living room, I'm controlling the radio in the kitchen (up to and including volume control). It integrates seamlessly with iTunes and you have full and pretty easy access to your library through the radio.

Setup could be bewildering to the networking novice. Given the other reviews, setup is pretty easy for wi-fi, but my house is wired for ethernet throughout. I plugged in the Squeezebox to the LAN, got through the initial setup and then spent two frustrating hours trying to figure out why it wouldn't play any internet radio stations. Finally buried in the Logitech FAQ's is a note that the internet radio doesn't work if you use a 10/100 hub! You'd have a hard time finding a hub that isn't 10/100... So while I can access my iTunes library, I've yet to get the internet radio up and running.

The FedEx guy dropped this off this morning. I couldn't belive how easy this was to set up. I entered my wireless password, it automatically downloaded and installed a firmware update, I created a Squeezebox account via the radio controls and I was all done! It even used my IP address info to automatically set up a list of local radio stations to choose to stream.
One minor quibble so far - when you turn the radio on it doesn't start playing the station that was streaming when you turned it off, until you also hit the "Play" button.

I was in the market for something to replace satellite radio, which is getting more expensive while simultaneously offering less variety and more commercials. I was debating between this radio and the Grace Wireless GDR-IR2000, which also seems to be a good product. In the end, the feature set of the Logitech Squeezebox Radio swayed me and I went with that model.

Setup took all of 10 minutes, and that was mostly the time it took to enter my wireless security key using the control knob. Once that was in, the radio downloaded a firmware update, restarted and I was off and running.

I've seen a lot of complains about the sound quality on these kinds of radios, so I was surprised to find that this radio sounds clear and has plenty of volume. Right now, I am downstairs with the radio playing upstairs at about half volume and I can hear it clearly.

The one feature that really tipped the scales in favor of this over the Grace was the variety of services. I use Pandora quite a bit. My wife likes Last.fm better. I also have a Slacker account (all these are the free accounts, by the way, you don't need the paid accounts to use these services on this radio). It's great having all of these services accessible from one place, and they all stream without a hiccup so far. My wireless signal between the router (downstairs) and radio (upstairs) has been at full bars the whole time to date. If you like podcasts, there are also applications that let you subscribe to your favorite podcasts and listen to them on the radio.

I also installed the Squeezebox server software on my Windows 7 computer downstairs that hosts all of my MP3s. The server control panel interface is pretty barebones (basically just looks like a tabbed Windows configuration dialog box), but the only thing I really needed to mess with was the path to my MP3s, which is pretty clearly shown in the interface. Once I did that, my music collection was accessible by album, artist, or genre in the home menu of the radio. I will say that if you want a clearly organized experience here, make sure all the ID3 tags in your MP3s are correct - a lot of mine aren't, so my artist & album menus contain some incorrect entries.

Something that might be a downside for people is the lack of a remote and/or battery. These are available for pre-order from Logitech, but they're pretty pricy ($50 for the 2 items) and they've already been delayed several times, so I wouldn't count on actually having them until they show up for real. I've heard that if you have a Logitech Harmony universal remote that you can program it to work with the radio, but I don't have one, so I can't say for sure. I don't plan to move the radio, so the battery isn't necessary for me. As far as remotes go, you can actually remotely control the radio from a web browser at the MySqueezebox site - changing what's playing, volume, turning it on and off, even rating your Pandora tracks thumbs up/down are all available via the web interface. That's been my remote control so far.

As far as the physical look of the radio, I think the pictures here make it look cheaper than it looks in person. It's very shiny glossy black and the display is quite bright. In fact, if you want to use this as an alarm clock, I pretty much guarantee that you're gonna want to crank the brightness down or it might keep you awake. The clock numbers are quite large though, with white numbers on a black background, so it's easy to read from a distance.

All in all, I couldn't be more happy with this purchase. Satellite radio costs me $180 per year, and that's without access to the online stream, which is extra. Basically, I bought this for the cost of about 9 months worth of satellite radio and got a greater mix of available genres & music with access to all the online services I use without the monthly bill.

The one thing that's going to make me miss satellite radio is the lack of MLB Gameday Audio from this radio. But even subscribing to that separately and only being able to access it from my computer will only be about 10% of the cost of satellite radio, so I think I can live with that. In the meantime, how about MLB & Logitech reps have a nice lunch and work something out for us baseball fans?

I am a big internet radio fan. There is no variety to terrestrial radio these days, and the satellite radio works best in the car. Internet radio has opened up a whole new world to me, and even replaced my old shortwave. I have had other products before, but they were a lot more like computers than radios compared to this one. It worked pretty fast out of the box, although it saves time if you do a lot of the set-up on your computer rather than using the cumbersome and time-consuming knob on the radio itself. I use it mainly for internet radio, but Pandora, etc., all seems to stream well also over my wireless network anywhere in the house. The Radiotime site is a good resource to set up folders for favorites, etc. and I have lots of stations arranged in folders by category for easy access. The radio itself has only six pre-sets, and in my case that was not enough.

Like all new products, this one requires some patience, and I am not sure all my relatives (and my wife) who just want to turn on an appliance and forget about it, would like it, but, if you are into radio, this is a real sweet set up.

My main complaint, which others obviously share, is that the long promised battery pack took forever to come out, and, when it did, immediately sold out. I was looking forward to sitting on the deck with the radio this summer. I sure hope the battery is back in stock before then. Logitech deserves some bad marks for stringing us along on the battery issue.

This is my third internet radio device (2nd alarm clock), I will pass on all the praise regarding internet radio in general, I think they are just great. FM radio's days are counted...


Pros:
* Nice color screen
* Nice Looking design
* Headphone out
* Line In
* Wireless
* Preset button is nice
* Able to add apps (nothing special so far for most of them)
* Has potential with future upgrade
* Nice alarm setup
* Auto dim is nice
* Sound is not great but good for a radio/clock

Cons:
* Alarm rang in the middle of the night for no reasons
* Menu is not well organize (why is favorite in the middle and not at the top, why having to scroll always down for sleep instead of having a dedicated button)
* Can't connect directly to a NAS box, have to use their Squeezebox Server, which in turn run on a PC which means it need to be on! Why Why Why cant I just connect to my NAS box??? Please note that you install the software on certain linux based NAS box if you are technical enough.
* Pricey, especially that extra battery and remote is $$ extra
* Snooze is the big button in the middle by the end of the week your alarm clock will be at the end of you night stand
* 6 preset buttons is not much when you have thousands of internet radios to choose from they are quickly filled
* Have to approximately guess volume for alarm
* No RCA or digital audio out
* Connect to logitech site for setup and saving settings, privacy can be an issue, (for a swiss company!)
* Sometimes fails to connect to some internet radio
* No USB input
* I have not fully tested the SqueezeCenter, I did have it installed on my NAS box but it seems that the Radio wanted to downgrade Firmware when I switched to the server ,lost my preset when I did that and got them back when I switched back


Conclusion
I recommend the Radio clock, even thou it has been a lot more buggy and my other ones, it does present a lot more potentional. I hope they fix the alarm issue, I don't like being waking up in the middle of the night...
If you are really non-technical (by non-tech I mean never touch a computer), this might not be for you.

Wishlist
* Categorize favorites
* Plain access to NAS without install server app
* Able to configure the preset button to anything (ex a sleep button, direct access to favorites etc..)
* Able to move, set the order the menus choices are where it is appropriate