We've got a Pure hi-fi mini-system, and it cost about the same - yet has CD, separate speakers, mp3 playback from (and DAB recording to) SD card etc etc. Oh, and it actually looks good too. Needless to say that entire product line is discontinued now.

You'll have Orlowski after you, you know that?

£170 for a radio.

Do they get radio transmissions wherever the designers / marketers of this device live?

The idea of quality and DAB in the same context beggars belief... I don't care how good the playback is, the source remains low bitrate crap.

And how many more identikit, retro look wooden boxes are the DAB manufacturers going to inflict on the market. The few DAB enthusiasts already own radios, all of them square bloody wooden boxes. If there's any scope for widening the market this ain't how to do it.

The main problem is that DAB in the UK is dyeing with some of the main things sound quailty / reception and lack of stations - mostly BBC.

On the otherhand Internet Radio has 1000's of stations with many of them not on 'the air'.

I bought an almost identical-looking (but more aesthetic IMHO) Ferguson DAB about 2 years ago from Curry's - it was 'on offer' for £30 and the FULL price had only been £50.... PURE are a bunch of mavericks trading on a name that is entirely unjustified as my Fergy is equally as good as this thing at a fraction of the price.

until I can actually get DAB on a whip antenna where I live. FM for the win!

We only get about half the freeview channels with the new Yagi in the roofspace as well, so it could be the house location.

And when it LOSES its sound, it's silent.

Is the volume dial free moving? Or is it graduated?

I had to take my last two Pure Dabs back as I couldn't turn the volume down enough for when I was about to sleep.

"without loosing its clean sound". Fail.

Go sit in the naughty chair with the big pointy "D" hat on.

Apart from it being crap old-style DAB [no indication of whether it can be upgraded to DAB+] - just what is it about the producers of DAB radios which obsesses themwith wrapping their sad, misguided products in cheap tacky wood-veneer? Such 'style' reminds me horribly of 1970s MFI/Hygena kitchens and the first generation of VCRs and TVs from the 1970s whose stylists were clearly receiving major backhanders from the makers of 'Fablon' self-adhesive pseudowood.

If you want to sell crap DAB radios you need to make them look modern, not like a loathsome throwback to the horrid days of Bri-Nylon, Vesta chinese-meals and duck-egg-blue bathroom-suites.

Oh my goodness. What a lot of party poopers. You lot sound as sad as the climate change deniers. Do you all hang out on bulletin boards and conspiracy theory sites? Get lives people- it's a radio with 30 WRMS - that makes it rather unusual at least.

Just the thing for 1993. Only it's, er, 2009.

The DAB we in the UK adopted is so far out of date, and so lousy in quality, it's little wonder that slightly more enlightened countries elsewhere have dumped it long since.

Of course when DAB+ comes along, then maybe things will improve, but if you've shelled out this kind of money for something that looks like being non-upgradeable and therefore obsolete, you're obviously not going to be one of those embracing the kind of digital audio broadcasting which the UK should have had in the first place.

As for the price: it's doubtless based on volume (unit, not audio) cost and as the market for DAB in the UK is now slightly less than the total number of advertisers using ITV, then Pure has done a good job in bringing the price down to that level, seeing as how sales might reach half a dozen this month and two the month after.

El Reg shouldn't lament the apparent failure to include Pure's powerpack as standard though: the Internet has plenty of tales of users who found the powerpack rather too hot an attraction.

Ah well. Another DAB radio, another era.

Perhaps El Reg would now like to give a thumbs up review to the Binatone portable record player? Apparently it's very good.