Home > Consumer Reviews > Boston Acoustics Recepter Radio - Clock radio

We bought this clock radio in Jan 2005; in Jan 2009 it suddenly stopped working. A lifespan of just 4 years is pretty shoddy for such an expensive clock radio.

Good things about it:
- Dual alarm feature was handy
- Sound quality was pretty good... but not magnificent
- Display didn't light up the bedroom at night, like so many clock radios do

Bad things about it
- The clock lost time: a few minutes a month. Having to constantly reset it was a pain
- When the radio came on with the alarm, the display sometimes flipped to show the FM channel of the radio station rather than the time. This was intensely irritating. When I am lying in bed working out when to get up I want to see the time: I don't care one hoot about what the exact FM value of the radio channel is. The only way to see the time when the clock did this was to manually turn the alarm off: completely defeats the point of a radio alarm
- One morning after I had switched the alarm off as I had done 100s of previous mornings, the thing simply died. None of the buttons now work

I can't say that I recommend this product.

Outstanding sound great clock radio. Great value for the money. The sound is very rich.

So you are picky about what goes in your home or office for your listening pleasure. Good for you. I'm quite picky and I'm very pleased with this little clock radio that is so much more. Sleek design, small footprint, easy setup and use, brilliant sound. These reasons and more (e.g., battery back up, dual alarms offering music, buzzer or both, twenty preset stations both FM and AM) make this a must have for those who want and need features and versatility.

I wanted a decent table radio with a small footprint for listening in the kitchen, and this one fit my needs very nicely. Sound and reception on AM and FM are very good. I did not consider the Bose Wave system because I felt it was too large, vastly overpriced, and the reviews here were not as favorable as I might have thought.

I found the other posted comments to be in general accord with my experience with the radio. I listen to classical (WCRB), and the sound is very good especially for its small size, but it does seem a little bass heavy, particularly with some male announcers, who tend to 'boom' a little. You can tame the bass by inserting damping material like cotton batting into the bass port at the back of the unit (try it with just a finger to see how it works), but some tone controls would have been welcome, even the old-fashioned transistor radio single knob Tone control.

I only listen to a couple of stations, one for news and one for music, but listeners who make heavy use of presets and like to change things around may find the system here awkward and inconvenient. There are 20 presets available, but they can only be stored sequentially as they are added, with no distinction between AM and FM and no ability to resequence them. Access to presets is quickly achieved by rotating the large knob next to the volume control.

These quibbles aside, I am happy with the radio and would recommend it to others, at least as far as the radio function is concerned (I don't use the alarm system). The price seems appropriate for the quality.

I also have an older KLH 200 digital AM/FM stereo clock radio, which has a separate speaker attached by a wire for the stereo sound. If Boston Acoustics had offered a similar version instead of this mono one, I might have bought that instead.

I bought this model for my office so the "wake-up" features weren't a consideration for me. What I was looking for was a clock radio that would get good AM and FM reception in an office building and would give me better sound quality than the sad old clock radio I'd been using for years. Happily, I got most of what I was looking for. The sound quality is excellent and the FM reception is perfectly fine for most stations with the antenna wire that comes with the unit. The AM reception on most stations is also perfectly fine if I turn the unit sideways but then I can't see what time it is so I'll be looking for an external AM antenna that I suspect will provide the kind of reception I'm looking for. I love the way you set the clock ... instead of up/down buttons you simply use the tuning knob to set the time. (Not that I plan on setting the clock a lot ... even though the power in my office building goes out frequently, thanks to this model's battery back-up function, it's already maintained the correct time through two power outages, one of which lasted 4 hours.) It's also worth pointing out that my Recepter does have an auxiliary input that requires a 1/8" (3.5 mm) stereo to 1/8" (3.5mm) stereo cable (not included) so, with the right cable, you could presumably attach a CD player or MP3 player and take advantage of the great sound that this unit offers. (Also worth noting is that the radio's FM antenna connector is a standard "F" connector and will accept the cable FM feed from most cable systems that provide FM programming.)