Internet radios: Crane vs. Aluratek

When I acquired these two internet radios to test a few months back, the CCrane and the Aluratek were #1 and #2 in Amazon sales. Since then a lot of others have come and gone on the market; both of these still rank near the top on sales.

So why buy an outboard internet radio when you can listen to all the stations anyway on your PC? The biggest reason is to reserve usefulness on your PC or laptop. Listening to an online stream chews up RAM and other resources; listening on an outboard "internet radio" just takes a small slice of your home or work's network bandwidth.

Understand that the listenability of the stream to which you've plugged into is dependent on a couple things: the strength of your home wireless network and the bandwidth of the stream used by the station that you're hearing. Dropouts are sometimes the fault of the radio station's stream. And online stations do occasionally change player url's and thus mysteriously disappear.

Neither of these units have flash memory or battery backup. If you lose power you will have to reset the connection to your router and your alarm clock settings. I would never use a device that has no power backup as an alarm, in any case, so I don't consider that an issue. The Aluratek screen is considerably brighter than Crane's, and easier to read. But it still goes dark when the power goes out.

Keep your network passwords handy! And don't lose the remotes...these radios are pretty much useless without them. Hint: get some velcro at the hardware store and attach any remote in your home to the device it controls.

Both of these radios offer small footprints so they can be set up unobtusively; they also each provide rear-panel audio-outs to connect the radios to greater-powered systems. Audio output from their front speakers is mono and just okay, but the rear-panel plugs provide a stereo output, if the original signal is stereo. They'd sound much better plugged into a decent set of computer speakers or your stereo system.

Both also include built-in wired ethernet connection. Neither are fancy and both are under $200 in cost. From reviews, it looks like the level of customer service you can expect from each company is about the same, with a slight edge to Crane.

And both give you access to more than 15,000 internet "radio stations" worldwide!

CCrane - A plain black box that uses the Reciva database and allows you to access up to 99 stations using the included remote control. Sets up quickly and easily. Instructions for firmware updates are available at the Crane website and can be installed directly using the remote and front-panel controls.

Aluratek - This is a little more stylish than the Crane radio and uses a proprietary database of stations that's constantly being updated. It offers a front-panel USB connection for firmware and station playlist upgrades and for playing music from your thumb drive. It also includes an FM tuner.







Bottom line? Updates are easier with the Crane radio but the thumb drive capability of the Aluratek almost evens it out (I don't care about the FM side, although it's handy to have). Sorry to sound like a xenophobe, but the fact that all Crane service calls are answered domestically is a big plus for me.

Advantage Crane.