Logitech Squeezebox Touch

Pros: Great audio quality. Extremely easy set up. Great web integration. Play your own library on SD Card or USB Thumb Drive

Cons: Non station presets.

Summary: I have owned over 10 internet radios. Four Logitechs and a sampling of the other company's offerings. Logitech's units are superior to any others on the market. The Sony Dash looks promising, licensing the Chumby Platform, but we have to wait for its release.

The Touch is a compact unit. It takes up very little real estate on your night stand. You basically plug it in, it finds your network, you enter the password on the very usable touch screen and you're off to the races. Unlike previous Squeezeboxes, this one almost sets itself up. In less than five minutes, you're listening to music. I purchased it to replace the Squeezebox Radio, a nice unit with a self-contained speaker, but inferior sound.

I have mine hooked up to my Audioengine5's and the sound is nothing short of excellent, probably owing in large part to the 24bit da chip, which reproduces the sounds with very little distortion.

The Touch has a 4.3" screen. Using the Flickr app, you can use it to view your photo collections, which is a nice feature. It will also display cover art from a variety of sources. You can play your Sirius stations through it, if you are a subscriber to the advance Sirius service. Pandora is there and once you input your account info, all of your custom radio stations come up. Virtually every major internet radio service is present on the touch and easily accessible. You can also download the Squeeze Server which will allow your Touch to access music scattered around your network, Wired or Wireless.

Alarms--There's never enough of them. The standard clock radio comes with 1 or 2 alarms. Some units and internet models give you several. The Squeezebox family gives you the ability to create an unlimited array of alarms with different music sources. Listen to Flamenco on Monday, Rock on Tuesday and 90's hits the rest of the week. Wanna wake up for the setting of the gold price in London, no problem.

Logitech has truly outdone itself on this model. In my opinion, the only thing missing is preset station buttons, but accessing your stored "favorite" stations mostly makes up for this omission.

For a simple clock radio replacement, the $299 price tag is high. However when you factor in all of the features, the ability to play your complete music library from a thumb drive and the probably elimination of your bulky stereo system, the Squeezebox Touch provides a lot of value, and best of all you don't need to be a sound system installer to get it up and running.