Electronic: Digital featuring GDIIR2000 Internet Pandora Wireless
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Grace Digital Wireless Internet Radio featuring Pandora and NPR (GDI-IR2000)
Best Grace Digital Wireless Internet Radio featuring Pandora and NPR (GDI-IR2000) Price
Grace Digital Wireless Internet Radio featuring Pandora and NPR (GDI-IR2000) Overviews
Discover a whole new world of talk and tunes — over 15,000 music, talk and sports stations — or stream your personal music library to any room in your home! This wireless Internet radio receiver puts thousands of stations at your fingertips, delivered directly to you in rich, full-bodied audio. One-year warranty. Model GRA-IR2000.
Grace Digital Wireless Internet Radio featuring Pandora and NPR (GDI-IR2000) Customer Reviews
I’ve been looking at internet radios for a couple of years now, but have been put off by the high prices and limited features. What seems to have turned the tide is the rise of a few major content providers and aggregators (Pandora, Reciva, etc.), which has enabled manufacturers to focus on the hardware, without themselves having to keep up with the thousands of content sources. The current crop of internet radios is what I’d call second generation. It will take more cooperation for standards among PC, TV, DVR, and other manufacturers to bring us to the third generation, but second gen was good enough for me to take the initial plunge.
As for the Grace GDI-IR2000, here are my observations after a few days of use. I’ve only used it for internet radio stations and Pandora so far (I don’t have a lot of music on my PC).
Pros: Easy to set up. Just realize that it’s much less tedious to rely on your computer to build radio station lists and Pandora playlists, even though you can do it through the radio. Sound quality is adequate for this type of radio; you can feed the output into a sound system if you want it better, but many stations limit the quality by their data rates. The remote is a very useful addition (see Cons, below); I wouldn’t buy the IR-1000, which doesn’t have a remote.
Cons: The human interface is an absolute mess. Button labels are small and virtually unreadable without a magnifying glass and flashlight. Button arrangement is almost random, which makes the labels very important–and they’re unreadable. Although the remote is laid out in a similar way, it’s easier to read and use, a saving grace (sic). As for software, the menus are usable, but not particularly intuitive. If you “set it and forget it” for a while, you’ll have to break out the manual to figure out how to make changes. Getting the radio to download revisions to the station lists that you’ve made on your computer requires unplugging the radio, then plugging it in again (how about a reboot button, guys?). Oh, and as others have noted, putting the aux-in jack on the front and headphone jack in the back is just plain stupid.
Bottom line: Despite the cons, I do like the radio, and consider it good value in today’s market; heck, I gave it four stars, didn’t I? But we’re not in internet radio nirvana yet. That’ll take a few more years.
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