Once upon a time, radio was the mainstay of entertainment. Then came television, computers and compact discs. Radio was relegated to a minor standing in the entertainment arena. With the Kitsound Surfer Internet Radio, this is all about to change.
With its sleek black lines and weighing in at 2.5 kilograms, it is eye-catching straight out of the box.
The setup on this machine is surprisingly easy. You plug it in, connect it to your Wi-Fi network and then cruise through the 15,000+ internet radio stations, searching by genre, locality or even word search for music you enjoy.
If this is not enough music content for your taste, then you can select FM mode, complete with static on bad days.
The Kitsound Surfer Internet Radio comes complete with a 3.5mm audio jack for both input and output. You can hook your iPod or mp3 player into the Kitsound and play your favourite songs. Then you can plug in headphones or even hook it into the auxiliary port on your main stereo system to really get the sound pumping. Not to say that the sound quality of the included speaker is no good, in fact it’s got a good clarity and can get quite loud.
Another useful function for the technologically savvy user is the ability to use the Wi-Fi network to access your computer and play songs from there (again, if you can’t find enough music from the 15,000 stations to keep you occupied).
The scroll function is of a good size and easy to use. It seems to be based along the lines of the iPod navigation wheel. The blue backlighting is excellent and the LED display is easy to read.
The Kitsound also offers an alarm clock function, although the brightness of the display may overwhelm those people that prefer total darkness to sleep.
The only issue we could discover with the Kitsound Surfer Internet Radio was a slight failure when the bandwidth was being used up by other applications. By this we mean that we were downloading files from the computers on our network and absolutely chewing our bandwidth. For the casual user we do not believe this will be an issue.
Overall the Kitsound Surfer Internet radio was an absolute pleasure to use. During testing we could not tune in to all 15,000+ stations, though we had a lot of fun trying. We think you will too.