C Crane CC WiFi Internet Radio CWF

I bought this radio despite reviews complaining of its reliability. It worked right out of the box and offers, for the price, far more presettable stations than its nearest competitor, a remote and an ethernet connection in addition to its wireless feature. It is also one of the smallest of the table top sets and will sit neatly in a little corner without drawing attention to itself an appealing feature to those listeners for whom appearance places a far second to content. I found its setup well thought out and mostly intuitive. The front panel offers only three pre-sets so do not lose the remote which replicates all radio controls and has a 100 pre-set capacity. The loudspeaker offers better than average fidelity of table top models.

This radio operates using the reciva internet radio website, which the Grace radio also uses. Registering the radio with that site allows the listener to select using reciva those stations of particular and recurrent interest and save their locations in the actual radio. These stations can then be accessed from a menu labelled MY STATIONS on the radio a very nice convenience. Of course wifi radio is only as good as your wireless connection and the streaming rate of the actual service providing the signal. In addition, if your wireless network is in use by several computers or other devices while you are using this radio you may experience bits of silence at times especially noted with broadcasts from foreign stations that are otherwise flawless. Most, but not all, American radio stations use servers providing reliable output to the internet, as do the government supported stations of Europe, Russia, China and Japan. However, if your cup of tea is Upper Volta or the Falkland Islands for example, well, the sometimes large gaps in the sound are not the fault of this radio. Having more than a casual interest in world news and having listened to shortwave broadcasts for many years, I have found that wifi radio offers far, far more foreign stations than shortwave these days without requiring a subscription fee (except, of course, the cost of your internet connection) and seems to be largely replacing shortwave broadcasts to the very well developed world. I found this radio an affordable and, so far, easy to use, trouble-free way of listening to what inhabitants of other parts of earth have to say about themselves and us, without a fade any time of day.

I had this up and running in about 5 minutes, very nice to set up, the sound quality through external speakers is very good, the built in speaker is just OK. Having access to all the stations is great and physically, it is very small which is good for a night stand.

However, it seems to have some firmware issues with staying connected. About every 2 days it looses all its connections and cannot reconnect without being unplugged and plugged back in. Apparently, it's not able to reset itself once the connection is lost. I'm not sure if it's the WiFi or Receiva site that's the issue, it always looses all the connections at once and new ones cannot be made. Power cycling always resets it immediately though.

The display is not very useful as a nighttime clock unfortunately. It always shows 2 lines, so the clock display is quite small, and once you set the backlight down to sleeping levels, it is very hard to read. They should have a single line all clock display with reversed lighted numbers on dark background, but don't.

The C Crane tech support is pretty much worthless as well.

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Update a year later Only deserves 2 stars after firmware update:

The latest firmware update has made it a very unreliable alarm clock.

Same issues with connectivity dropping out, but now with the latest firmware update by going to the Network menu and telling it to rescan, it reconnects without power cycling. It still can't do this operation itself, you have to do it manually each time.

The real killer though is that whereas before, if it couldn't get a WiFi connection for the alarm function it would go to the beep alarm, now it just does nothing, so the alarm doesn't work. This is VERY BAD.

Bottom line is that it's not a bad WiFi radio, but because of the useless clock display and unreliable alarm functions it's not usable as an alarm clock.

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It looks like we are supposed to believe that C.Crane has designed this for the American Market.

On their website it states:

"Well, we couldn't let the Europeans and Brits have all the glory, so we've built a WiFi radio of our own."

The problem is, it doesn't look like they designed this radio or built it. It seems they are taking a radio they are buying from someone else and sticking their name (and a $100 premium) on it.

If you go to Amazon's German site and search for IPdio mini Internetradio, you will find the exact same radio for 85 euros (about $100).

So what are American's paying twice as much for, the brand name C.Crane stuck on the radio?

BTW, in Germany the same company sells the C.Crane radio and the Grace radio. They sell the Grace radio for more money and position the C.Crane one as their cheaper "Mini" radio.

Read Best Reviews of C Crane CC WiFi Internet Radio CWF Here

I have had a trio of wi-fi radios, and this is by far, the flimsiest device of the three. I don't mind plastic radios, but I never knew that plastic could be produced this thin. To say that the tuning knob has the feel of a Fisher-Price toy radio, is to besmirch a perfectly good toy maker. The sound from the speaker is equally thin, and the software doesn't allow for use with Pandora nor with MP3 tunes music locker. For the same price, the Grace wifi radio blows this away in both build quality and sound reproduction. On the plus side, I DO like the look of the radio, and set-up and implementation couldn't have been easier. I have used many a fine CCrane product over the years, really like the and support the company, and was hoping to be able to recommend this device, but unfortunately, cannot.

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I've had the CC Wifi Internet Radio for two weeks now. I had no problems setting it up with my Wireless network and it works quite well although it lacks an external Wifi antenna.

It uses the Reciva database of radio stations (over 14,000 radio stations claimed)(). Although using the single knob to scroll through lots of radio stations. They are organized by location or genre and its fun to search the world for interesting stations.

Using your reciva.com account you can set up your favorite stations which show up on your radio (after you have registered it) under "My Stations". You can also add other streams under "My Streams".

This radio is nice and compact and light (constructed of plastic). The display is only two lines which means you have to do a lot of scrolling through menus sometimes.

It comes with a remote which is handy if you want to access more than 3 stations (up to 99 with the remote) you can store on 3 buttons on the front. These stations are stored locally rather than under your reciva account under "My Stations".

It also will stream audio in various formats (MP3, Windows Media, Real, iTunes (non-protected), Ogg Vorbis and also with the new firmware FLAC files) from your PC or PnP device such as many Networked Attached Storage devices. In fact it works great with my Netgear ReadyNAS where I have all my music stored.

I looked at the number of Internet/Wifi Radios and chose this one over the others because of two things: its small size and fact that it also has a wired Ethernet port as well as Wifi connectivity.

Only issues are that it sometimes loses the Wifi connection (not an issue with a wired Ethernet connection) and some stations take more than a few seconds to buffer before you can listen to them.

UPDATE June 5, 2012

I had to have this radio repaired by CCrane last year because the network connection died. They replaced the networking board cost $59 + shipping. I was hesitant but decided to do it. It seemed pretty expensive given the original price. Fast forward to June 2012 and the radio dies again. Of course it is "out of warranty" and so it's either pay to have it repaired or they would be willing to give be $40 credit toward a replacement. I have to say that I am disappointed in the quality of this device. It should have lasted way longer. I have plenty of other electronics that are more reliable. So buyer beware! This is not a high quality piece of equipment. I'm going to replace with another brand.

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