internet radio option has room for improvement
I bought the refurbished one after raving reviews here about how you couldn't tell a refurbished one from a non. I have to say I was a little bit disappointed of the quality of the item: There are a marks between the front plate and the "bezel", as if a screwdriver has been inserted - I believe the front has been removed and a tool actually has been inserted. There's also a part of the "bezel" where there are scratch marks and finally there are scratches on the display. That said, the quality isn't bad, it's just not on par with what I had expected.
Sound quality: It's really good for listening to podcasts or radio; voices come through very well. Music is worse, it's not terrible but bad enough for me to rarely ever use the Spotify Connect feature or to listen to music at all via the Revo. But my main goal was to use it for talk radio and podcasts so I'm content with the overall quality.
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Features.
Radio: Haven't used Dab, only FM but that one works, as FM almost always do, very well. Reception is very good, no need to raise the antenna.
Spotify Connect: Hard to judge. As almost always with Spotify Connect (I've tried four or five different gadgets with it) one time out of five you cannot cast to the device since in the Spotify app the device cannot be found. But this, as implied, seems to go for all Spotify Connect enabled devices.
DLNA: This feature is, in my view, as on every device, completely useless. On the Revo, as on all DLNA- enabled devices, you can only play one song at a time, even the Genre option only allows for playing one song at a time - you can't in other words choose a certain genre and expect it to play all the songs in that genre, which makes this option pretty much useless. But this is not the Revos fault, I believe, this is how DLNA behaves. The navigation of DLNA is also terrible, extremely tedious. There's really no point in supporting DLNA.
Internet radio: Hard to navigate, clunky interface. Frontier Solutions, which is the company behind the software for the stations, has a a a really sad, ugly site, which is where you add your stations and favourites and podcasts. The site misses out on loads of podcasts, even all of the biggest, most popular podcasts in Sweden is lacking. The site and the interface is uninspiring and slow. But. The biggest problem here is actually with the Revo, that it cannot remember where you were if you turn the Revo off before finishing a podcast or internet radio show. The only way is to leave the Revo paused and on over night or for two or three days or whatever it takes before you have the time to continue to listen. This is a major issue, that it cannot remember where you left off. I really hope there's a software update that deals with this; it would make the Internet radio option suddenly usable. Having it support "Up next" features of podcasts would be heaven, of course.
Bluetooth: I haven't used it much, to be honest. But it seems to work on par with other Bluetooth receivers I've used - here the hardware remote is really handy for skipping in songs,for example. All in all, the Bluetooth option has worked well.
So, why four stars? I love the hardware buttons and that you can assign eight FM stations, eight DAB stations, eight for Internet radio. I love to have a hardware remote (even though I'd had preferred the old, bigger remote over the credit card sized one that came with mine). Hardware remote was a deal breaker for me.
Reception, as said, is really good. Sound quality for talk radio as well.
Bluetooth seems to work well.
If only the Internet radio option had worked better it'd been a five star device.
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