Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Rip off, April 21, 2004
By A Customer
This radio is advertised as one of the best around. I fell for the hype and I want to warn you that it is full of flaws. 1) reception was no better than my small Sony radios. 2) The sound is supposedly balanced for talk radio. To me, it sounds muffled (as if everyone is talking out of a cave) with few highs. Yuck. 3) There is no handle, just a grab indentation. A radio this big is sure to drop with nothing to hold onto. Yes, they do sell a carry case - one that makes the whole thing as ugly as can be. 4) The buttons have to be pushed down hard to change. An individual defect on the one I got? Who knows? 5) This is very expensive for a whole lot of nothing. Don't be taken in. Get a Grundig field radio or a Sony instead. I regret my purchase.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Not happy with the CC radio Plus, July 6, 2004
I have to agree with the fellow from Atlanta! The CC Radio plus doesn't sound all that great for the money you pay, and the AM sensitivity to me is no better than the GE super radios
that cost three times cheaper. Sony radios do a much better
job dealing with night time fade. the FM reception is
nothing to brag about either. I think the weather radio
should have SAME encoding for the money you pay forit.
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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Just Misses the Mark, March 9, 2005
After an intense day of listening and operating I just recently returned a CC Radio Plus that I had purchased from a local retail store. I really wanted to like this radio but in one critical area it simply did not measure up and because of this I could not justify the price.
I am limiting my comments to the AM radio section of the CC Radio, since that was my primary intended purpose for the radio.
This radio aims at an admirable target: the footprint is quite interesting, the concept of a long distance AM receiver is enticing, and the build quality seems solid.
This well-balanced package sits squarely on a flat surface with rubber feet that grip well and a rubber grip that allows one to lift it. Loaded with a set of batteries, it weighs a lot and gives an impression of quality. A pleasing heft.
The quality also shows in the 'feel' of the tuning knob, a digital encoder with velvety smooth positive detents. The encoder is as good as that on any shortwave receiver I have used.
Everything else, including the tone and volume controls, has a quality feel to it.
Having a digital frequency display is such a great idea for AM listeners who like to log 'DX', or distant stations. There is no question of the frequency and this helps to identify unknown stations. The tuning step is 1 kHz, which is an interesting idea as it allows slight mistuning to avoid close interference on one side of the other of the station you are trying to listen to.
So why didn't I like it? Very simply, I found the audio on the AM band unlistenable.
In an AM radio, there is always a tradeoff between the radio's selectivity-- the ability to pull out a station with strong stations on either side-- and it's audio quality. The narrower the bandwidth or 'window' of the radio, the more effective it is at tuning to, say, 650 kHz with a strong station right next to it at 660 kHz, and not being interfered with by the strong station at 660. However, for good audio reproduction, this window should be as *wide* as possible, so these two requirements are in conflict. In my opinion, the CC Radio is just too narrow for comfortable listening and results in a listener's fatigue very quickly. It is, however, quite respectable in being able to be tuned right up against a strong signal without any bleedthrough. What I am trying to say is: the radio was doing exactly what it was designed to do, it is just that I feel the bandwidth chosen by the design engineers is too narrow for comfortable, casual listening. What suffers most is the high frequencies, meaning that the audio sounds muffled. It is, for example, hard to discern whether an announcer says "fifty" or "sixty".
I wonder if the claim of 'radio tuned to the human voice' is just a marketing spin to explain away this most glaring shortcoming.
This muffled audio can be mitigated a bit by tuning 1 kilohertz higher or lower than the station frequency. For example, if you are listening to a station on 820, tuning to 819 or 821 (with one simple click of the tuning knob) does improve the sound. (There is an electronic reason for this, but I'll spare you the explanation.) However, doing this increases the audio distortion, so that although you lessen the sound's muffled characteristic, you do so at the expense of introducing a raspiness or gritty edge to the sound that the discriminating listener will most certainly notice. I found this too distracting to accept. I found myself listening to the distortion instead of the audio program.
I had really wanted to like this radio for the features that impressed me and that I outlined at the beginning of this review, but it's basic performance in the area of audio sound reproduction (the basic purpose of a radio!) was, in my opinion, not up to standard.
Ironically, on the way home from returning the radio for a refund, I turned on the AM radio in my car. I was able to receive a station (at midday) about 100 miles away with practically no noise, and with excellent audio quality. Why can't we have a table radio that sounds as good as the typical car radio? That, I think, would be the perfect AM radio.
May I suggest you look at the GE Superadio II, which sounds absolutely beautiful, though it is cheaply manufactured and does not have a digital readout. I auditioned both radios side by side and concluded that the Superadio could hear 99% of everything the CC Radio could but at a much more pleasing audio level.
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