Electronics : Tangent 11167 QUATTRO Walnut Internet Radio

Rating: - Great quality and easy to use
I have owned my Quattro since December (Xmas present) and am delighted with it. Not only was it a cinch to set up with my home network, the other personalisation features make it a great music accessory.

Register on the Reciva website and set up 'My Stuff' - your own favourite radio streams which will be refreshed whenever the Quattro is powered on, and also a list of Podcast streams which will be available for you to select.

Not only can you play the BBC radio stations, but also you get access to the Listen Again content, which is simple to navigate and play / pause / forward / reverse.

Additionally you can stream content from a media server or PC. If you use the Media Player Universal Plug and Play you avoid some of the cache issues which another reviewer mentions. UPNP allows you to scroll through your music collection (or stored podcasts) without any delays. I have had very few problems with Network timeouts or pauses.

The sound quality is excellent, no doubt helped by the solid casing and relatively large diameter speaker.

There is always room for improvement, and a better quality and more informative display would be welcome (not sure why the 'Dab standard' 2 line display has become the default for so many appliances - a throwback).

Overall I'm still giving 5 stars as I am buying another unit for the kitchen which will make a welcome change for the warbling DAB technology which also seems to hark back to an earlier era.....

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Rating: - A Poor Offering from Tangent
I have now tried three Internet Radios and this was the second worst the one I had was a white 11178 model. I had it connected to a BT Home Hub network and music stored on a Freecom Network Hard Disk. There are a number of poor features that should make potential purchasers wary:
1) When the Tangent was switched off it lost its connection to the network, there was no sleep mode.
2) When this happened there was a long wait whilst the Tangent re-connected.
3) Every time the "reciva_media_cache" lost its connection to the Tangent and needed to be re-created. This took an age to do with 10,000 songs saved.
4) To do this, not only did a PC have to be left on but the "reciva_media_cache" file had to be deleted; before a new one could be created.
5) Moving between Radio and Music playback mode was difficult.
6) When the radio was working there were often buffering pauses. I have a tested 1.6 megabit connection to the internet so there was no shortage of bandwidth.
7) The distinction between the different Internet Radio models is not clear. I have left feedback on each as essentially they are all the same.
Currently I'm using a Non-RealAudio device and getting BBC Radio with no difficulty. I think the bios design in the Tangent combined with the use of RealAudio may be the source of the problems.
I was able to ever get hold of the manufacturer, who was polite; but never answered any of my technical questions.

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Rating: - Looks and sounds good but no track info and slow to start up.
Sound quality was good and it looks nice. Being able to play on-demand shows (mostly from BBC stations) is very nice, and the radio can also play from internet streams and podcasts. However, you have to find and set these up through the Reciva website.

However, startup time was slow (around one minute from switching on to finding stations and playing music). This may be common to all internet radios (I haven't tried any others), but is not common to FM/DAB radios.

Also, it doesn't display the track artist and title, which is very common with DAB. From reading the Reciva website it appears that many internet stations don't include this information but even with those that do (eg. Virgin Classic Rock), the Tangent doesn't show it. I don't know why all internet stations don't include this info anyway - I'm sure it's not technically difficult and would be a big selling point, especially as many internet stations don't have DJs.

One possible reason why the Tangent doesn't show this information, even if it is provided by the station, may be because it only has a two line text display. This isn't really sufficient and would make it difficult to show Artist, Title, Station and bit rate (although the last of these isn't so important and could be lost).

Finally, there are a couple of features that are mentioned in the manual that I couldn't get to work. When playing an on-demand show you are supposed to be able to press "3" and move to a different time in the show (by typing in a time or ffwd/rew). However, I found this just switches the radio to preset 3, as it does when you're not playing an on-demand show.

Overall it is quite nice and I do believe that internet radio is the future. I just don't quite think it's the present yet. If I were to do it again, I would buy a cheap DAB radio for now, then get an internet radio in a year or two when the technology has matured.

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Rating: - A Very Gentle Introduction to Internet Radio
This has had fantastic reviews from a number of sources and they are well deserved. I had the unit up and running within ten minutes which gave me over 10,000 stations. In another ten minutes I had it streaming audio via Windows Media Player from my pc - really easy.

Two very slight niggles. The control dials feel slightly poor quality compared to the rest of the unit and; the power supply unit is big and ugly.

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Rating: - Superb Internet Radio
Being the proud owner of a Squeezebox for over a year now, I am very familiar with the world of internet radio streaming, and to that end I cannot recommend the Tangent "semi-portable" internet radio enough...

Setup is an absolute breeze, if you're familiar with connecting a laptop to a wireless network, you can set this up in minutes.

Sound quality is warm and room-filling for such a small compact unit. Even low bit-rate radio stations sound like quality broadcasts.

The fact that it achieved 'What Hi-fi Sound and Vision ***** 5 Star Award for Best Internet Radio 2007', really swung it for me.

If you're considering purchasing this, don't hesitate, you will not be disappointed.