Home > Consumer Reviews > Tangent 11166 QUATTRO red high gloss Internet Radio

There's not a lot of information on the internet about these radios, so I thought I'd review it and help anyone who is looking at buying it.

I've owned my Tangent Quattro for a couple of months now, I'm a Brit living in Canada for a couple of years and I was really missing Radio 4 so I bought it as a birthday present to myself.

I really find it hard to find fault with this radio. The Tangent Quattros are the top of the range wifi radios and look and feel beautiful. I'm a Mac user and a Mini driver and I put it in the same bracket as those two products for design and function.

It is simple to use, sounds fantastic and consequently gets used more than my FM radio. I love being able to switch between Jack Fm in Calgary and Radio 4 in London with only a couple of seconds pause whilst it buffers when it switches over.

Just to clarify if you are thinking of buying one, all you need to make it work is a wifi router somewhere in the house and a power point. After that you'll forget it's any different to an FM radio.

Being the proud owner of a Squeezebox for over a year now, I am very familiar with the world of internet radio streaming, and to that end I cannot recommend the Tangent "semi-portable" internet radio enough...

Setup is an absolute breeze, if you're familiar with connecting a laptop to a wireless network, you can set this up in minutes.

Sound quality is warm and room-filling for such a small compact unit. Even low bit-rate radio stations sound like quality broadcasts.

The fact that it achieved 'What Hi-fi Sound and Vision ***** 5 Star Award for Best Internet Radio 2007', really swung it for me.

If you're considering purchasing this, don't hesitate, you will not be disappointed.

This is our first Internet radio so whilst I cannot compare it to any other models, I can say it's been great to use and does literally open up a whole new world of music.

The initial setup is pretty standard, I just needed to enter the MAC address of the radio into my router (for MAC filtering) and then enter the WAP key of my router back into the radio itself - the menus are very easy to navigate. The radio supports WEP, WPA and WPA 2 encryption. I have found it has a good, solid wi-fi connection to my Netgear router.

If you don't have a wireless router, the Quattro has an ethernet port so you can just plug it straight in to the router - although this might limit placement of the unit.

After that, I had immediate access to about 10,300 radio stations, which are searchable by location and genre. It is a huge list and their are only 6 programmable buttons to store your favorites so you do need to dive into the menus. Fortunately, the lists are very easy to navigate through although it's slightly annoying that when you choose location you start in the A's and you can only go forward to reach UK (i.e. you can't skip back past Z and go that way). The genre menu works in the same way.

You can (and I highly recommend that you do) register your radio on the Reciva website and then build up a favorites list of stations on-line which, after a reboot of the radio, gets downloaded to a My Stuff menu option which helps pin down the massive choice.

The Media Player works very well too although I hit one problem which is not the radio's fault. I was using iTunes on a PC to manage my music (and sync with an iPod) but this does not have support for a UPNP server - which is by far the best method of using the radio to connect to your music collection. You can buy software which fills this gap, but I found a cheaper alternative - use Windows Media Player 11 which has a UPNP server built-in and buy a plug-in for it which allows you to sync your iPod (half the price of the UPNP server which works with iTunes). This works really well and, as long as you don't mind leaving the PC on, access to my Media Player library and play lists was seamless. This is only my experience to date and there might be alternatives that I've missed but it's all working happily so I`m happy and if you didn't mind managing two separate pieces of media software, it's not even an issue (I did mind!).

The sounds is fantastic for such a small unit - there is quite a bit of bass and it manages to easily fill a large room with a crisp, clear sound. It's worth noting you cannot change any settings other than volume though. There is a line out if you wanted to put the unit through an external amp and speakers so you can control how it sounds.

The unit itself looks great, is well made and solid. The only downside is that the power supply is external and a bit chunky but at least that can be hidden away somewhere and keeps the unit itself small and neat.

Overall, I am very impressed and I think it will be well used in our house.

I have now tried three Internet Radios and this was the second worst the one I had was a white 11178 model. I had it connected to a BT Home Hub network and music stored on a Freecom Network Hard Disk. There are a number of poor features that should make potential purchasers wary:
1) When the Tangent was switched off it lost its connection to the network, there was no sleep mode.
2) When this happened there was a long wait whilst the Tangent re-connected.
3) Every time the "reciva_media_cache" lost its connection to the Tangent and needed to be re-created. This took an age to do with 10,000 songs saved.
4) To do this, not only did a PC have to be left on but the "reciva_media_cache" file had to be deleted; before a new one could be created.
5) Moving between Radio and Music playback mode was difficult.
6) When the radio was working there were often buffering pauses. I have a tested 1.6 megabit connection to the internet so there was no shortage of bandwidth.
7) The distinction between the different Internet Radio models is not clear. I have left feedback on each as essentially they are all the same.
Currently I'm using a Non-RealAudio device and getting BBC Radio with no difficulty. I think the bios design in the Tangent combined with the use of RealAudio may be the source of the problems.
I was able to ever get hold of the manufacturer, who was polite; but never answered any of my technical questions.

good internet radio but take a nosey at the pure evoke flow - similar price but DAB included !!!! ... and a VERY classy look/finish !!