Acoustic Solutions DAB/FM Clock Radio

I wanted a cheap and cheerful DAB clock radio - and this fits the bill perfectly. At £40 it's extremely affordable. The design won't suit everyone, but it's fine for the bedroom.

Once plugged in, it took seconds to auto-scan and find all the available stations. I thought the buttons were all self-explanatory - there aren't that many and I didn't need to wade through the instruction booklet. The green LCD 2-line display is basic but shows you the usual stuff, station, scrolling text etc. With the radio off, the time is displayed in 24-hour format, although I think they could have used bigger text.

Two tuning buttons scroll up or down alphabetically through the stations, the delay is around 1 or 2 seconds. I was pleased to see you can toggle between FM and DAB, and manually tune for a FM frequency. But there are no station preset buttons with this one. There are snooze and sleep buttons, along with an alarm button which allows you to set a time and select if you want to wake to a buzzer or the radio.

There's one speaker, positioned on the top of the case, but the minijack headphone socket at the front gives you stereo output.

The sound quality is fairly average. Speech is ok, but some of the music stations lack bass, sounding a bit tinny even through the headphones. I mostly listen to speech radio - so it's fine for me. When it's switched off, there is a slight hiss from the speaker (a common problem for cheaper models) but I'm glad to say the noise isn't very noticeable.

The aerial is a decent length, and it comes with a DC adapter to plug into the mains there's no battery option with this one.

Sadly, it didn't work straight out the box. My frozen LCD display was traced to a loose circuit board inside. It took 5 mins to fix by unscrewing the case and getting inside. Probably a one-off - rather than a fundamental design fault - but you never know.

PROS

• price - one of the cheapest I've seen
• easy to use, didn't need to bother with instructions
• nice to have FM as a backup

CONS

• sound quality is average, slight hiss from the speaker when turned off
• no station preset buttons
• the silver-coloured plastic design won't be to everyone's taste

CONCLUSIONS

• A decent no frills DAB clock radio for those on a budget, I'd recommend it.