Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)The RIR205 looks good and seems to be well made. It can pickup most internet radio stations from around the world. That includes real radio stations if they are broadcasting live on the internet and also amateur stations being broadcast by individuals. Of course you can do the same thing with a PC but it's harder to do and you have to install different audio player programs, codecs and all sorts of things while the radio just works. It will even play BBC stations that I can't play on the PC because it says I'm not in the U.K. It has stereo speakers that provide good fidelity but they are small and not as loud as some other radios having just one big speaker. The radio will play Slacker Radio which isn't a real radio station but has almost any kind of music sort of like like XM or AOL radio. Slacker will usually work when other internet stations won't. They may have less bandwidth requirements or less overhead to play, I'm not sure. The radio has an alarm clock function but since it gets it's time from the internet I found that although the time is usually accurate it's not always reliable because it won't work if the internet out of service like mine frequently is.
Originally I purchased an RIR200 from J&R through Amazon but when I got it couldn't get it to work at all so I only gave it 1 star. I sent it back and it was replaced with an RIR205. Audiovox was good about replacing it and are more helpful than most other companies. The two radios seem to be identical except the 205 comes with it's own wireless router but I never got that. The new RIR205 wouldn't work at first either and even though I already had 3 older routers I had to buy a new WRT54G then the radio worked just fine. A lot of owners report having wifi connectivity problems with the RIR200 and that must be the reason why. The radio uses vtuner.com and rcainfiniteradio.com to get it's list of stations, not Reciva like a lot of other radios use. Vtuner doesn't quite have all the stations that Reciva does but generally works well and new stations can be added. You can go to Vtuner.com and try it out for free if you want to see if it gets your favorite stations or the kinds of music you like. You can also store Favorites that you listen to frequently but they go to the RCA website so the radio depends on being able to access a third party website everytime it does anything unlike some other models that store favorites locally in the radio's memory. This generally works well but can be a problem if the RCA or Vtuner websites are down for maintenance or unreachable. Also, since RCA sees everything you listen to they could possibly spy on you and keep a list of your radio listening habits. That could be a problem for owners who live in areas where the government considers some stations to be subversive.
This radio is made by Audiovox and sold as the Audiovox in Europe and as the Acoustic Research ARIRC200 in Canada. There is a Google Group for the Canadian version called "Acoustic Research ARIRC200 Internet Radio" that has discussions of that version. There are a lot more reviews of the RIR200 on Amazon listed as product B0016OK5O0. If you search for B0016OK5O0 you can find them.
Click Here to see more reviews about: RCA RIR205 Infinite Radio Tabletop Internet Radio with Wi-Fi Enabler (Black)
Listen to thousands of global music and talk stations with the RIR205 Infinite Radio by RCA.You can listen to web-only streams, as well as AM/FM transmissions broadcasted over the internet from all over the world.Radio includes a WiFi enabler that easily connects to your home modem or router with a standard Ethernet cable.The radio then creates a wireless internet link to the RCA internet radio.The WiFi enabler provides a quick and easy wireless setup option right out of the box.If you are using the radio where WiFi is unavailable, you can simply plug an Ethernet cable from your modem or router to begin listening.You can choose from several audio sources including internet radio stations, local AM/FM stations, radios internal memory, USB input, or Slacker personal radio.Slacker personal radio is an internet radio service where you can create personal custom stations.Using Slacker you can tag the songs you love or ban the songs you dont.Slacker will then customize the music you listen to with every input you make so that the music played is narrowed to your preferred tastes and genres.Slacker offers over 100 genre stations, 10,000 artist stations and millions of tracks.The Infinite radio has 6 preset stations per audio source so that you can conveniently and quickly find the stations you enjoy the most with the push of a button.Enjoy on-demand weather through Weatherbug, giving you one-day, three-day forecasts and emergency alerts.The RIR205 has 512MB of built-in memory so that you can record approximately 10-hours of your favorite music from the internet radio or FM radio source.Use the personal online portal to customize your internet radio.Selections are made on the portal webpage and auto-synced to the radio.You can store your favorite presets and genres or add our own stations and URLs.
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