Review With its ‘chip company that also makes radios’ label firmly in the past, Pure Digital can now move on to produce products at the top end of the market. But to justify its premium price of £170, the "luxury" Evoke-2S needs to deliver a something special. Fortunately for Pure, it does just that.

Right out of the blocks, the machine feels chunky and well built - it's 290 x 210 x 120mm. You certainly wouldn't want to drop it on your foot, but it’s still light enough to move around easily enough. The machine is done out in the familiar Evoke maple finish with carry handle, and has an attractive brushed aluminium face, with click dials and push-button controls.

Everything is laid out simply and labelled clearly, so there's no need to go near the manual to figure out which button does what. All the controls feel solid and precise.

The machine isn't overloaded with accessories. In fact, you get European and UK power leads, and that's it. However, you can purchase the company’s ChargePAK internal rechargeable battery for true portability, as well as an iPod dock. We can't help feeling that, for the price, the Evoke-2S really should come with these in the box.

In a bid for environmental credibility, there's a power switch on the back that flips between turns the radio off entirely to eliminate even the power consumed when the thing's on stand-by. Around the back, you'll also find an unused mini USB Port - it's for "upgrades", Pure says. There's a 3.5mm input socket for portable digital players or a CD deck, as well as a 3.5mm headphone socket.

Round the front, there's the screen, which we initially felt looked a little small and even after testing, we felt Pure could have been a little more generous here. But the yellow-on-black, 128 x 22 OLED screen is one of the brightest and smoothest we've seen on a DAB radio and deals with all the information available quickly and with good clarity.

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The unit has a good sized detachable aerial which helps to deliver a quick automatic search on start-up. The unit picked up all the stations available in our area. There's a good level of coverage with full DAB Band III (174–240MHz) and FM reception (87.5–108MHz). The unit is capable of decoding all DAB and DAB+ transmission modes one to four, up to and including 192Kb/s. You can also trim the DAB station list or rearrange it into your preferred order should you so wish.

The alarm functions - wake, kitchen and machine sleep timer - are all easy to find and set. The review function, which can pause live broadcasts and rewind back through the previous 15 minutes of a show, worked well, although the duration varies from station to station, and depends upon the quality of the broadcast. The radio provides a generous 50 DAB and 50 FM station presets, and is also easy to tune either automatically or manually.

The Evoke-S2 also supports Intellitext, textSCAN, FM RDS and RadioText. Not huge amounts of Intellitext around as yet, but for now the football tables available on TALKSport work well.

Despite having a decent feature set, Pure's pitch for this radio really centres on its sound quality. The Evoke-S2 has a digital end-to-end audio sub-system which uses an integrated switch-mode power supply, class D amplifiers and custom-tuned speakers together delivering 30W RMS output. The unit boasts two mid-range 7.5cm drive units and two 1.9cm dome tweeters which give the unit genuine range and clarity for its size.

Scanning through the radio channels, we decided to give Radio One a try. Surprisingly, Sara Cox wasn't playing something specifically aimed at 12 year olds. AC/DC’s Back in Black on Radio One - whatever next? A good point to try some volume, and we found this radio can go very loud without loosing its clean sound.

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Pure says the unit can handle lots of bass and there's a bass adjustment mode that's easily accessible from the front panel, so we turned it right up. What is really nice here is that when the bass is turned up, you actually get more bass, not just a vague thumping sound and loss of clarity on the rest of the frequencies, as per so many bass-boosters.

With the bass output back on a more usual setting, we found Angus Young’s high-pitched guitar solo also received good attention. Noel Gallagher’s Half The World Away was delivered with accuracy with the acoustic guitar parts of the song coming through with particular clarity.

Talk radio is also handled with aplomb, voices sound real and alive not just words falling out of the speakers.

The Evoke-S2 performs almost as well in FM mode, but with DAB having the slight edge as the sound feels a little fatter. Plugging in a portable music player also delivers good results, though your own results will depend on the player you're using and the format your music is encoded in. But even with low-grade MP3s, the unit doesn't sound bad.

We also got a pleasant surprise when we plugged in a long since retired portable CD deck. The extra data really gave the radio’s capable drivers something to get stuck into. The unit is actually good enough to form a good partnership with a more serious, non-portable CD deck.

Verdict

There is not much that the Evoke-2S that doesn't do well. If you're serious about quality in your radio, then it's well worth a look. The audio quality really does surprise, and the unit also has enough functionality in its locker to deliver more than just good sound. It's just such a shame that it's really too expensive. ®

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