Home > Consumer Reviews > Magic Box Imp Wi-Fi Internet Radio & Media Player

Firstly to the person below I would like to say that if you upgrade the firmware will be see that the imp now has additional features compared to when it was built in the factory. The most significant of these being is that you are now able to fully customise the LCD brightness and have different settings for when it's on and in sleep mode etc.

I only hope that they continue to upgrade the features because this is where my criticisms of the product come in.

One of the main reason why this product appealed to me was not just because of its ability to play internet stations but also the fact you can source music from your computer's hard drive and play it directly through the imp.

1. I had a few problems in getting my music folders to share with the imp. I have 1000s of tracks in my computer and I had to do a bit of moving around and trying various things to get them to share. I have still to figure it all out but I'm getting there.

2. Sourcing music from your computer through the imp is quite simple. You can search for tracks by artist or album name. However the playback functionality is quite limited. You can only play tracks if you queue them individully. So you have to select a song and then queue it and then select another song and so on. I think this is a major setback. I don't understand why you can search by album name and then you are not able to queue up a whole album anyway?

There is a random play mode, however, again, you can only play tracks in a random fashion that have been individually queued. A reason why I thought his item would be so good would be for parties etc. I thought I would be able scan my all the computer on my music and then can queue everything up at once to play by random mode without having to worry about the music stopping etc However its the total opposite. I really don't understand why there is no random 'play all' feature and truly hope they will include this in later firmware update.

So onto the good points and there are a lot:

1. Its extremely easy to use. The jog wheel is extremely useful (but I suppose since the birth of the Ipod we have come to expect easier menu navigation on all our mutimedia devices).

2. The sound quality is fantastic considering its relatively small size. At first I was suprised that there was no graphic equaliser to enable you change the bass and trebel levels etc. but its honestly not needed. It sounds good whatever you play and it can go pretty loud before any distortion kicks in. If you connect it to your main music system through the headphone socket at the back it sounds phenomenal (and then you can probably change the sound setting through your hifi anyway).

3. It connects to the radio very quickly. You can turn it on and off and it will resume from where left off. All in all it seems to remember everything so there is no need to configure it everytime you turn it on.

4. The fact that the number of radio stations accessible continue to grow daily. Initially there were 400 UK or so radio stations. I connected this morning and there were easily over 500. And that's the UK alone. There must 1000s of stations accesible in total.

5. You can search for radio stations by genre, name and country all without having to go anywhere near your computer. Its ingenious. I was listening to some happy soca music all the from Dominican Republic this morning just few a through simple clicks!

5. It looks sexy. Its got a very sleek design, nice finishing and a good weight to it. Whilst this is a much cheaper internet radio compared to its rivals, it is not a cheap looking product. It looks like it is built to last. I don't see why the others are so expensive and most (if not all) are not able to play music from your computer's hard drive anyway.

6. The fact it so portable and easy to move from room to room. I live in 3 bedroom house with my computer upstairs I can make the imp work from any room. If i'm cooking I just plug it in the kitchen and I then I can have access to literally any song I want from the kitchen.

Technology doesn't get much better than this, especially when it is this easy to use.

However I cannot give it 5 stars until they rectify the problems I have mentioned above. With any any other current mps player on the market you are able to select tracks via genre, album name, song name, artist name etc and then play one track, the whole album or everything in random order. Why they have omitted all this from the imp is a mystery to me. After all it is effectively an mp3 player that is only limited by how many tracks your computer can hold

Overall though I cannot recommend this product enough

I am really very pleased with my Imp. It has a very good sound quality. The choice of stations is simply stunning. I am enjoying taking a sound trip around the world, as well in the UK where I live.
However, a word of warning. It was quite complicated to set up with my Netgear Router. You have to know what you are doing. I am quite computer literate, but not an expert.
Basically, it was straightforward if you remove the security settings from the router (but not something you would want to do for long) But it proved a lot more tricky with the WEP key.
However, I praise the makers. They provide a cheap helpline number, and one call sorted my problems.
So, if you are ok with a PC and router, go ahead and get this - it is a fantastic piece of kit.

I moved from an area with great DAB reception to a place where I could barely pick up anything on DAB so I thought internet radio could be a possible alternative. I did some research and plumped for the Magicbox. I am delighted with it. Access to all the DAB stations I used to enjoy plus thousands more radio stations from all over the world. The sound quality is as good as any similar size DAB or FM radio although this depends upon the bit rate of the transmitting station - some are pretty poor but there are plenty of others that are very good.

The set is easy to use. Unfortunately, mine did not automatically set up on plug and play but this was due to the configuration on my Netgear router so make sure you have your router manual handy when you set it up. Accessing stations is simple although beware if you select USA because there are around 6,000 to choose from so it is difficult to find what you want - to put it mildly. As more stations set up then this could become an increasing problem. However, it is possible to search by genre. Any negatives? Not really although it could perhaps do with more than 10 presets when there are thousands of stations to choose from! Choosing a top ten out of that lot is tough!

By the way you can also network the magicbox to your PC's I-tunes library and stream straight to wherever you have your magicbox.

One day all radios will be like this.

The Magic Box was easy to set up. I mainly got this for my wife who is from Finland and got fed up trying to tune to Finnish radio using shortwave. She really likes it. I think there could be more Finnish stations on it but you can ask ask Reciva to add stations you know about that are not downloaded to the Magicbox and they will make then available for download.
Works with WEP secutity fine. Sound quality is pretty fair. As long as you have a wireless broadband router it is no problem to set up.
Couple of things I am not sure about. It has a fixed link to Reciva as far as I can see to download the stations - not sure what happens if Reciva disappears.
Also it would have been great if it worked with Pandora which I use for internet music on my PC - but I don't think it does this.

I would definitely recommend this unit. It is really easy to use, easy to setup and looks and sounds great.
The unit supports WPA encryption, which I think is a great plus for this unit as others only support WEP.
It supports "no broadcast of SID" on your wireless router, which is a recommended security practice, however I have noticed that during the first setup of the unit, or when you unplug it and re-plug it back in later, you need to have your SID broadcasting in order to be able to configure it again. The good bit is though that it remembers your WPA key, so you don't have to keep typing it back in!!!
Contrary to other reports I've seen, you can alter the brightness of the backlit display, there are individual settings for the 3 different modes, i.e. Active (on and your pressing keys), Inactive (on and you've not pressed a button for a while) and "standby", so if you intend to use this in a bedroom you can dim the display right down.
Really easy to find radio stations from all around the world. You can search by location or by genre. There are 10 presets so you can save your favorite stations. You can also play "on demand" services, like those that Radio 1 offer, which is shows that have been recorded and can be played at a later date (Cool!, so I can listen to Pete Tong more often!).
Sound quality is great (but obviously dependant on the stream coming from the radio station) and sounds even better when pluged into a home Hi-Fi.
Go on, buy it, you know you should ;-)