The Perfect Clock Radio - A Pipe Dream?

By Cyrris

Few consumer electronic products are given as little attention as the clock radio. They don’t make for interesting reviews, they’re difficult to get excited about, and unlike plasma TVs or lava lamps, they don’t really add much to the look and feel of a room. It is for this reason, I can only assume, that no-one has bothered to create a perfect clock radio yet.

What irritates me however, is despite the fact that they’ve been hugely common for decades now, you still can’t go out and buy a cheap one which has no glaring issues. Surely manufacturers have had enough experience over the years to iron out the bugs? The only way you can get a product approaching what I would deem an acceptable level of quality is to spend, spend, spend. So, being a very light sleeper and extremely fussy about the things I buy, that’s exactly what I did.

The clock in question is the Sangean RCR-1. I decided on this model after some exhaustive research in to what was out there - a depressing mass of cheap junk topped off with a few high quality Tivoli Audio devices approaching $300. Even for my tastes, that’s outlandish.

The RCR-1 slipped in at around $150, which was still far more than I expected to have to pay for a solid clock radio, but the lack of alternatives (given my strict requirements) meant I didn’t have much choice. The clock radio which it has now replaced was a $40 no-name brand from Target, so it wasn’t going to be hard to beat.

The Sangean is by no means perfect, and perhaps my irritation at that fact is why I felt the need to even write this piece at all, but it does represent what I feel is a good effort by a company which does what no others have really bothered to do. At least, not that I’ve seen. What follows is a list of clock radio pitfalls which I feel need to be addressed in every product, and how the Sangean stacks up.

• The real basics: Size matters. No-one wants an enormous device taking up valuable desk space when it doesn’t need to. This was one of the reasons I bought my last clock radio - it was super thin (maybe an inch and a half in depth) and had virtually no footprint. The Sangean is a fair bit bigger, but mostly in width and breadth (approx 6.5 inches each). At only 4 inches deep, it’s very reasonable.

  Decent sound quality is what the old model sacrificed to be so tiny, I suppose. The RCR-1’s speaker on the other hand is, for it’s size, quite respectable, with an output jack if you want something even better. Like all modern clock radios, it also has battery backup if the power goes out. Exciting stuff.

• A clear display: This one is a bit of a no brainer, but surprisingly the manufacturer of my last clock even got this wrong. While the digits were massive and easy to read from far away (face-on), reading them from an angle was near impossible due to the cheap LCD’s terrible viewing angle properties.

  The RCR-1 meanwhile trumps this with an amazingly clear digital display (with an extremely bright back light), but also with an analog display which amusingly catches up to the digital time when you set it. Having the analog display also means the time is easily readable when the backlight is switched off, which is how I usually have mine. Which brings us to the next big issue.

• A proper dimmer: Being the light sleeper I am, I find it terribly hard to get to sleep when there is a noticable source of light eminating from near my head. My outgoing clock radio had a neat feature in that it automatically dimmed itself depending on how much light was in the room. Unfortunately this meant that there was no manual dimmer - a big letdown as the “dim” setting was far too bright. The last few years I have kept a few small books to cover it up at night.

  The Sangean lacks the automated feature, but the manual dimmer is second to none. There is a switch for “bright” and “dim”, with the dim setting itself being adjustable in itself, right down to emitting no light at all. This is fantastic for me, as keeping it quite close to the lowest setting means I don’t need to worry about it at all.

• No backlight bleeding: Clock radios should not be made of a thin white shell of plastic, like my old one. The backlight of the LCD shone right through the case, effectively meaning that to blot out the light, I had to cover the entire clock rather than just the face of the display.

  The Sangean thankfully is made of solid materials and feels like a quality product, with no light shining through where it shouldn’t. Of course, it’s not such an issue with the excellent dimmer.

• Simple controls: This is one area where the old clock was reasonable - it didn’t have many features, so it only had a few buttons. However, there is one set of controls I have found to be difficult on all clock radios I have ever used. The tuning and volume slider wheels. On my old clock it was impossible to change the volume or the tuning without working myself into an odd position in bed while reaching over, incessantly fighting with the gritty movement of the wheels to get the volume or station I wanted.

  The Sangean fixes this by having larger, smooth sliding wheels on the side which are extremely easy to move, while being heavy enough so that brushing against them won’t change anything. The Sangean does have a lot of buttons, but this is a natural side effect of having a lot of features. Plus, seven of the buttons on the top of the radio are for present stations - something my last clock didn’t have at all, though admittedly not hard to find on other models.

• Smart alarm settings: I recall my first clock radio let me set the time for the radio to come on each morning. The next radio after that let me set two different times, which was good for uni with some days starting with later classes. The Sangean, however, takes this to the next level. With the RCR-1 you can specify which days of the week the alarm will go off. Need to be up at 7am each week day, but 9am each Sunday? This clock can do it, and you never have to remember to set the alarms (or unset them) the night before. This is a brilliant feature and given the lack of complexity in it’s computation, I can’t believe it wasn’t standard on more clocks years ago.

  The Sangean goes above and beyond with the alarm in two other ways as well. Usually a bright blue colour, the clock’s backlight changes to a light orange when the alarm goes off. This makes for an excellent visual cue on those darker early mornings, and also helps to make sure you don’t walk in to anything as you are getting up to find the light switch.

  Finally, the alarm audio (whether you have it set to a radio station or an actual beep) will come on very quietly, and gradually get louder. I can’t count the number of times I have been slightly startled awake with the old clock radio because the station was playing something a bit loud at the time. In addition to this, the Sangean’s radio alarm settings have their volume set differently from the regular radio, so if you turn it up during the day and forget to turn it down before you go to bed, it won’t wake up everyone in the house when the alarm goes off next morning. The station too is set independently, so if you left the clock tuned in to your usual techno-junk station, you can rest assured you’ll still wake up to your usual news station or classic concertos.

• No Humming! This is the one area where the old clock simply wins out, and is the only big beef I have with the Sangean. The quiet “humming” so common in small appliances like clock radios is from their power transformers. Whilst a quality transformer can be designed or treated in ways to mitigate this, the most basic way to eliminate this problem is to have the transformer separate from the device. As such, my old clock had the transformer at the wall plug, far away from my head, and causing no problems at all.

  Not so with the Sangean. While the humming is so quiet that it’s impossible to hear in the day time, at night when my head is right near the clock, it is infuriating. Thankfully, tightening the screws at the back of the device actually made a substantial difference, but I am still considering whether or not take take it back over this small yet critical shortfall. I have emailed Sangean and they said it should indeed be replaced, but given the nature of the problem I do really wonder if I would just be given a clock with the exact same issue.

And so, there we are. I never thought there would really be this much to write on what is certainly not the most exciting topic of the modern era, but it just goes to show how little thought has gone in to most products, and how different that makes the Sangean. But it’s still not perfect. The humming needs to go. The backlight really should have an photonic sensor for this kind of money, and the controls could be simpler. Enabling or disabling DST for example requires two button presses too many. And the manual was pretty lame.

That said, it does have even more bonuses which I haven’t gone over yet, simply because I find them superfluous. The clock can tune in to the atomic clock radio frequency to ensure it always has the right time - something not available to me in Australia though. There is also a “nap” feature, letting you easily set it to alarm in 30, 40, or however many minutes up to 120 before it alarms - perfect for afternoon siestas. It’s getting silly now.

But while it’s nice to know that one company can get so close to making the perfect clock radio, it’s a bit disturbing that after having these around for so long, we still don’t have a perfect one.