Com One

A reasonably priced table/portable Wi-Fi radio.

Imagine listening to more than 5,000 radio stations from all over the world in a radio in your home. 

You can if you have a high-speed connection and a Wi-Fi connection to the Web and Com One’s Phoenix Wi-Fi Radio.  It's both a battery-operated portable as well as a table radio. 

Wi-Fi radios aren’t real radios in the sense that they receive over-the-air signals from near (AM and FM) and far (shortwave) broadcasters. Wi-Fi radios receive Internet radio station streams where their signals come via a WI-Fi connection.

These devices are small, radio-shaped wireless computers that play music streams available on the Web.  They’re also able to stream music you have stored on any computer hard drive wirelessly connected in your home.

The Phoenix weighs less than two pounds and uses self-charging AA batteries (provided), so you can comfortably move it from room to room.

You can listen to music through the built-in stereo speakers or via headphones.  You can also add a Bluetooth adapter (available separately) to send the radio’s audio to your Hi-Fi entertainment system.

Sound quality from its speakers is OK – not fantastic, but good enough to let you hear the difference between a low quality stream and a high bitrate, high fidelity stream from the same station. Plugging a set of small, powered speakers into the headphone jack provided terrific sounding audio.

I just turned it on – let it find my WI-Fi router – added my password and it installed itself with little fuss.  It also found all the available computer music files on all the computers on my network.  Within a minute I had thousands of radio streams – and my music files – available for playback on the Phoenix.

Programming my favorite stations was a lot easier than with last year’s Acoustic Energy Internet radio.  You had to navigate through a confusing menu system to program the AE.  Phoenix provides you with a Web browser interface page, which allows you to drag and drop stations into eight pre-set buttons. You can also program stations using the radio’s LCD screen and joystick controller.

The total number of stations listed on Phoenix start-up screen is small – but you can add any station you like if you know its Web address.  For instance, the Phoenix offered only the 56K stream of WFUV, Fordham University (New York) radio but I was able to add FUV’s much better sounding 128K stream.  This was especially important to me because although I live a short distance from the transmitter – I can only “receive” WFUV” via Internet radio.

The Phoenix proved to be a great performer in my tests.  It allowed me to enjoy music from around the world without having to worry about receiving those distant stations.

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