Pure has released an affordable digital radio that can be a standalone device as well as integrated into a distributed audio system, writes Stephen Dawson.

As frequently happens, when a new technology comes onto the market place, the quickest consumer electronics businesses to respond are often not the Japanese and Korean giants, but smaller, nimbler outfits.

And so it is with digital radio.

One such as ‘Pure’, a UK-based outfit. It has quite an extraordinary range of digital radios, ranging from the digital equivalent of the ‘trannie’, through to compact stereo systems with separate speakers. There are 21 different models as I write.

The Pure Sensia is perhaps the most radical looking of them all. Shaped like an egg, measuring 280mm wide, 166mm tall and 180mm deep, it has black ends where the stereo speakers are covered by cloth grilles, a coloured body and a touch screen LCD monitor on its face. The body can be in white, black, yellow or red.

The touch screen is full colour and quite high in resolution, with 640 by 480 pixels packed into its 145mm diagonal size.

It has a flattened section on the bottom on which it may rest, but it also comes with an odd little stand – somewhat like a shallow egg cup! – for slightly greater security. And there is a stylistically similar remote control (it is oval and its body is colour matched).

To make digital radio products you have to master digital technology, and this being a premium product Pure has packed some of that into the unit alongside the digital radio (there is also an FM radio built in, but not AM).

Widely connected

In particular, the unit can talk to the world via the built-in WiFi (both the b and g standards are supported). If you are stuck in the wired network world, an optional USB WiFi dongle can be used with the system. What it offers here is streaming of sound and display of photos from the network, and beyond. And the ability to use certain Internet features: specifically Facebook, Twitter, Picasa (a site for hosting and displaying photographs) and
AccuWeather.com.

A beautiful user interface is provided via the touch sensitive screen – with some functions also provided on the remote. The loudspeakers are 75mm full range units, one for each channel. Each gets 15 watts of continuous power (not ‘RMS’, which is how they are specified). While not far from each other, if you are reasonably close some stereo effect is evident by virtue of them effectively firing directly to the sides of the unit.

The unit is powered via a compact ‘wall-wart’. As an option extra you can buy a rechargeable ‘ChargePAK’ which allows you to go portable. At 32 watt-hours, you should get some hours of use from a charge unless you’re running the thing full bore.

Before exploring the advanced network features, let’s look at digital radio.

I’m in Canberra, which has been bit of a challenge, technologically, over the past few years. For reasons best known to itself, for broadcasting purposes, the Federal Parliament, which is based in Canberra, and the Department of Communications (whatever it may be called from time to time), which is also based in Canberra, regards Canberra – the capital city of Australia – as a regional area, not a capital city.

Happily, the Department has finally consented to a trial of digital radio in Canberra. Unhappily, being a trial the transmitter only gets a thousand watts, rather than the 12,500 to 50,000W real capital cities are getting, or the 20,000 to 80,000W Canberra FM stations get.

Also unhappily, between my home and the Black Mountain transmitter from which this feeble digital radio signal is being broadcast there is another mountain.

Despite these hindrances, the Pure Sensia worked. Outside to be sure (my office has metal foil insulation that plays havoc with reception), and with occasional drop-outs (the signal quality reported by the unit was typically around 30%). That it did so at all was incredible.

The unit also supports all text and graphical slideshows broadcast by the radio station.
The unit did its scan of the relevant broadcast frequencies within a couple of tens of seconds and presented a list. A touch on the screen of the named station selected it instantly.

WiFi gives more

For proper listening tests, I retreated to my office and used the other music capabilities of the unit. I set it up to work with the WiFi in my office, and once I’d authorised it to access the shared music resources in Windows Media Player, it worked reliably at retrieving and playing the many hundreds of hours of tracks I have available.

Oddly, it populated its list of artists in a somewhat random way, rather than alphabetically. You can scroll the list by sliding your finger up and down on it, iPhone style. But with several hundred artists listed this would have taken a while. So I used the search facility. You just touch the magnifying glass icon, and that brings a search box at the top right of the screen. You can choose several fields on which to search. Putting in ‘beatles’ gave me a list of all the tracks from that band which are on my computer (which is to say, all of them). Or I could put ‘beatles’ in ‘Artist’ and ‘abbey’ in ‘Album’ to show only the contents of Abbey Road.

The sound quality was obviously constrained by the size of the unit. You are not going to get room-filling volume levels from this unit, but at good listenable levels there was a reasonably well balanced sound with sufficient upper bass to deliver convincing sounding music.

If you want higher quality sound, there is a 3.5mm headphone output which sounded pretty decent though the old Sennheiser headphones, and you could at a pinch use a 3.5mm to twin RCA cable to plug it into a stereo system, making the unit just a front end. (There is also a 3.5mm analogue auxiliary input).

Lounge lizard

In my digital radio deprived hometown, I don’t get ABC radio (apparently it doesn’t have the transmitters installed yet). But you get more options from the Sensia, because it has access to Internet radio stations. To make full use of this you have to sign up to Pure’s media mortal, creepily entitled ‘The Lounge’. It’s just a matter of entering your unit’s serial number, getting a six digital activation key via email and entering that into the Sensia.

Once I’d done that, searching the list of thousands of radio stations on the term ‘abc’ gave me Canberra’s local ABC station in seconds. JJJ doesn’t seem to be supported (copyright issues I’d reckon, as far as the Internet goes). You can also pick stuff from ‘The Lounge’ itself, including a range of ambient sounds.

It also has access to a huge range of podcasts for streaming. Some of my favourites such as Econtalk and the Skeptics Guide to the Universe were readily available. Radio stations and podcasts can be added to a ‘Favourites’ list for easy access.

The interactive section of the screen to the top right can be easily expanded to fill the screen. Press a couple of different spots and you can bring up an expanded description of the media being played and a progress bar. You can drag the position marker of this to jump to a different place.

Likewise, you can have a photo slideshow (with the photos drawn, for example, from your computer) showing full screen or in the top right quarter.

The Internet ‘ap’ features worked, although I’d confess to far preferring a computer. I don’t use Facebook, but I did try out Twitter. The interface was okay using the virtual keyboard, but it was more one of those things that is amazing because it is possible, than something you’d necessarily seek out. The Accuweather feature could be useful though (you can set your own location).

So the Pure Sensia is rather more than just a digital radio. It is also a very powerful portal into Internet media (but not video), and music and photos available over your home WiFi network.

And the interface is beautiful and effective, which is a true rarity.