After putting the book on subtle design through the shredder, Pure’s designers have come up with the dazzling new Pure One, a DAB digital radio for under £50 – in bright pink.
Pure aren’t a company afraid to experiment with design – previous designs have involved a weird bug like creation and another that looked like a mutant Toblerone – but they’ve always impressed us with the quality of their products.
Happily, the new Pure One is also available in more restrained black and white finishes, and serves up a very impressive feature set for the asking price.
The scrolling text monochrome display shows station name, status icons, time and signal strength, with one touch tuning giving quick access to 20 DAB and FM (with RDS) stations.
Designed to be used all around the house and outside, there’s kitchen and sleep timers, USB upgradeability and support for the rechargeable ChargePAK battery pack.
Nifty new features include textSCAN – which lets listeners pause and control scrolling text so they’ve time to scribble down onscreen information – and Intellitext, which offers on-demand access to DAB extended text broadcasts, like sports news and headlines.
Battery life is quoted at around 35 hours of DAB listening from six standard C cell batteries, with the option to run the unit from the mains.
Supported by a full 2-year warranty, the Pure One will be available from May 2006.
Specifications: DAB digital and FM radio with full Band III DAB reception capability, for reception of all UK DAB broadcasts. Compliant with ETS 300 401 and capable of decoding all DAB transmission modes 1-4 up to and including 192 kbps.
Frequency ranges: DAB Band III 174-240 MHz, FM 87.5-108 MHz.
Timers: Sleep and kitchen timers.
Speaker: Full-range 3″ drive unit.
Input connectors: 9V DC power adapter socket (230V adapter supplied). Mini USB connector for software upgrades.
Output connectors: 3.5 mm headphone socket.
Controls: Standby; volume, browse & select dial; volume/mute; timer; presets; info; DAB/FM; menu and stations.
Presets: 20 DAB or FM presets in a combined list.
LCD display: Custom, easy to read LCD with 16 x 2 character display plus status icons.
Mains power supply: 230V AC to 9V (0.8A) DC external power adapter.
Battery power supply: Six C (R14) batteries or ChargePAK (not supplied). At normal listening levels alkaline batteries provide approximately 35 hours, and ChargePAK provides approximately 20 hours of portable DAB listening.
Dimensions: 210 wide x 145 high x 72mm deep (excluding controls).
Aerial: Integral telescopic aerial.
DAB radio (Digital Audio Broadcasting) is really taking off in the UK.
We thing that the sheer quality of BBC radio, 4 in particular, is a major reason why the UK is being seduced by DAB.
The continued growth of DAB is hoped to receive a further boost as uber-regulator, OfCom, plans to release further, new DAB-able spectrum.
Despite our catastrophic experiences with the 
Context-sensitive buttons either side of the display provide a simple user interface offering fast access to relevant features – it’s one of the best interfaces we’ve seen.
A unique feature to Pure is the ReVu function, which lets you pause and ‘rewind’ live DAB digital radio, courtesy of a constantly updating 20 minute buffer. 
The package is rounded off by two stylish Rosewood speakers with 5¼” woofers, and 19mm Mylar-dome tweeters, a simple remote control and aerial.
Set Top Box (STB) and PVR company NDS have today announced that they have reached an agreement with Frontier Silicon, a fabless manufacturer of digital media semiconductors based in the UK, to work together on technology to protect digital TV and DAB (Digital Audio Broadcasting) content on mobile devices.
Many readers, especially the non-UK massive, may be thinking ‘So what? Who and who have signed a deal?’ Well the significance of NDS moving this way is that it may signal where Sky is moving. Sky, as I’m sure you know, is the satellite TV company who own the UK in satellite delivered TV, and who’s parent company News International now owns US satellite giant DirecTV.
After our clapped out Sony mini-system refused to play one track too many and the usual thump on the side failed to yield the required result, we realised it was time to find a new stereo system for the office.
After several trudges up London’s hi-fi Mecca, Tottenham Court Road, and long periods scanning the minutiae of online spec sheets, we decided that the Onkyo looked like the one for us.
Unlike many other all-in units in the same bracket, this puppy offers a ‘proper’ amplifier with high-quality Wolfson DACs delivering accurate digital-to-analogue conversion and discrete output stage circuitry for a clean output signal.
Admittedly, most of the channels sounded absolute rubbish, but it was a revelation to find so much content available.
The FM and AM tuners were equally straightforward enough to sort out, with the auto scan quickly scooping up a list of available radio stations.
The system would make a great bedroom, kitchen or study stereo system, offering a huge range of radio channels and enough poke to accompany the occasional air guitar wig out or party. 
The world’s first wind-up FM and DAB digital radio, the Freeplay Devo, will be on sale in the UK soon. 
There’s a set of handy stereo RCA (phono) sockets onboard, letting users plug the radio into their home entertainment system, with a built in headphone socket for late night listening. 
When the batteries run out, a 60-second burst of action on the wind-up lever should reward the user with 3-5 minutes DAB reception or one hour of FM pleasure at normal volume 
BSkyB has announced The Gnome, a wireless digital receiver gadget that lets Sky subscribers listen to radio (or TV) anywhere around the house. 
The natty wireless receiver works with all Sky boxes and lets subscribers get an earful of over 80 digital radio channels – as well as the television channels in their Sky package – at no extra charge. 
A somewhat mellower Brian Sullivan, BSkyB’s director of customer products and services, observed that the Gnome was a “fun product that adds value and flexibility for Sky’s growing customer base.” 
Frontier Silicon have announced the “world’s first multi-standard, multi-band mobile digital TV chip set”. 
In a fug of industry-speak, Anthony Sethill, CEO of Frontier Silicon, told the Broadcast Asia Conference in Singapore, “We strongly believe that regulatory, spectrum allocation and installed infrastructure issues could considerably slow down the deployment of MDTV worldwide. With our experience in developing pioneering semiconductor solutions for digital broadcasting, we recognised this as a company early on and deployed resources to develop multi-standard ICs. Our aim is therefore to remove this barrier by quickly introducing a solution, and we are on course to introduce our Kino 3 solution in 2006”. 
Korea is expected to see commercial MDTV services based on DMB rolling out during 2005, with the UK and Germany following in 2006. 
Frontier Silicon has launched a new module that claims to bring personal-video-recorder (PVR) like capabilities to DAB digital radio. 
Recordings can be saved onto a memory card on the same radio or played back on any compatible audio unit. 
Frontier Silicon’s software provides an interface through which EPG and dynamic service information (DLS) can be viewed, with scrolling text allowing information ‘wider’ than the 16-character screen to be seen. 
More and more people are using computers or portable players for music, even though traditional radio still leads the competition, according to a recent market study. 
Last week, Yahoo revealed their determination to become big noise in the music industry, unveiling a