Digital tuning, night lighted clock & dial,and quality construction. AM reception is good.

As outlined above

I live in NW Montana, where the nearest AM and FM stations are 40 miles distant. My power supply is a photovoltaic array with battery storage.I have been satisfied with my Optimus 12-603A radio with an external FM antenna, but the analog tuning is a pain. I had hoped the ccradio-plus would solve that, and ordered one from their "orphan" bin. Digital tuning is great, but there are shortcomings: (1)AM reception is no better than Optimus. (2)FM reception much poorer. There is no external FM antenna connection. (3)There is no reception on either TV or Weather bands. (4)When using 120v AC, my modified sine-wave inverter produced an audible distracting hum on the radio. (5)The quality of the sound is less rich than the Optimus. I have also tried a Bose Wave machine with similar disappointment. Overall the CCRadio is a quality product that has all the bells and whistles, but is deficient in FM sensitivity and sound quality. Too pricey, unless you are a Yuppie in a metropolitan area with nearby stations.

Similar Products Used:

Optimus 12-603A Bose Wave Machine

Good sound, pulls in stations well, nice feature set, nice design and build.

Slightly larger and heavier than expected, headphone jack output is mono only. A bit too expensive.

My intial impression when taking this radio out of it's box was that it was bigger and heavier than I expected. It's more of an appliance, than a portable. That being said, it's still smaller and better looking than it's competitor, the GE Superradio. There is a handle on the back of the CCRadio which does make it easier to pick up and carry, something I do often when I'm listening to it and I want to walk into another room without missing anything. The CCRadio is not a pocket radio that you can pack in your luggage on an airplane trip, but it is small enough that I would take with me on a car trip. Normally though, it remains in my home office and/or bedroom.

This radio performs and sounds extremely well on the AM band and I have had good performance on the FM band as well, with the built in stock antenna. I'm in Northern California and was able to pickup Utah and Los Angeles AM stations at night with no problems.

I like the features and design of the radio. It has digital tuning, a clock, sleep timer function, alarm and a switchable lit display.

I like that when listening to the radio, if you disconnect the AC power cord, it automatically switches over to battery power (and vise versa) with no interruption of service.

I also like that you can choose to have the radio display the time or the station you are set to and the radio stays where you left it.

For the price, I feel that this radio is slightly expensive. I would have rather paid about $100. for it, although I don't regret buying it even though I paid more. Some people have complained that this radio has muffled sound. I have not found it's sound to be muffled at all. On the contrary, the speaker sounds very nice and is a joy to listen to for many hours at a time. It's supposed to be optimized for voice though, so if you are looking for something to listen to music on, this radio is not the best choice. For me, I use this radio to listen to talk radio and news (including NPR on FM), and for this purpose, it excels. When I want to listen to hi-fi music, I turn on my home stereo or portable CD player with headphones.

The CCrane company offers a full 30 day money back guarantee so I'd recommend you try the radio out for yourself, with plans on just returning it if you end up not liking it. That's what I did and I ended up liking it and not returning it. If you listen to news, sports and talk radio this is a good radio to purchase.

Similar Products Used:

Radio Shack DX-398 and other generic clock radios.

The C.C. Radio has exceptional AM reception. The speaker is tuned to play human voices, which makes listening to talk radio a real pleasure.

FM reception is good, but the sound quality of music on the radio is average at best. If you want exceptual FM radio listening, the KLOSS Model 88 is a must hear.

When I first read about this radio I was searching the net for a good AM antenna to improve the reception of a radio I used primarily for listening to talk radio. In my search, I found a review of what was claimed to be "the World's BEST AM Radio". I was skeptical, but ordered the C.C. Radio for a trial. WOW! This radio is truly the best AM radio I have had the please to use.

The C.C. Radio is a digital radio which tunes AM from 520 to 1710 kHz, FM from 87.5 to 108 MHz, VHF TV audio Channels 2 to 13 and NOAA weather from 162.400 to 162.550 MHz. Separate Bass and Treble combined with a 5 inch speaker tuned to reproduce the human voice, provide truly exceptional AM fidelity. Fine tuning on the AM band is in 1 kHz steps. AM sensitivity is excellent, and the ability to tune in 1 kHz increments allows me to tune-in weak distant stations, even when they are adjacent to strong local ones. The radio can store 5 stations into memory on each band.

The built-in weather band easily tunes my local NOAA weather station for current weather conditions. The radio features a special Weather Alert feature which can be set to either flash a visual signal or sound an alarm to notify me of weather emergency updates. Be careful though, I found that the alarm really startled be at night when I was awakened by an alert. I now only use the visual signal!

FM reception is good, but FM sound is only mediocre. If you are interested in FM radio, the Model 88 radio designed by Henry Kloss (Cambridge Sound Works)is excellent. It is the radio the Bose Wave Radio should have been and is less than one-half the price.

I am very impressed with the build quality and AM performance of the C.C. Radio. For AM tuning and listening, it easliy out performs any other portable or table top radio I have used, including the AM section of my Yamaha 2095 receiver. I enjoy listening to this radio. Is it truly "The World's BEST AM Radio?" I happen to think it just may be!

Dial accuracy, overall workmanship, audio quality

No pull-up handle

Maybe I was expecting too much, and maybe I am not enough of an enthusiast to realize that good A.M. radio reception is difficult to obtain, but I expected better daytime reception that my new CCRadio Plus is delivering. Night time reception is better, but still less than I expected especially after all the hype from the advertisements I have heard about this radio. A surprise was the F.M. reception.......AWESOME! The quality, features, and workmanship are absolutely top notch, and I think the sound quality is excellent contary to some other reviews I have read. The price? Well, maybe a little high, but I do believe this radio will last for many, many years making it a pretty good value. he G.E. Super Radio was a little less than half the price of this one, but the quality is not there and its impossible to trust the dial, the accuracy is terrible! I am considering the purchase of an A.M. antenna for my CCRadio Plus, but have heard they don't help much. Overall, I am not unhappy, just a little let down.

Similar Products Used:

G.E. Super Radio

Great AM & Fm Reception, Excellent Build Quality, Alighment & Features

Audio Quality

Having owned a GE Superadio III and a Sony 2010 for several years, I finally decided to take the plunge and find out myself if the hype about the CC Radio is true. I have listened to radios extensively for many years and have also operated a service shop where I had access to test and alignment instruments and service information to align tuners and compare the "before" and "after" performance of many units.

I'll start out by making it clear that, in my experience with portable receivers, the CC Radio is overall excellent in weak signal sensitivity and selectivity. Specifically, on AM (Medium Wave), the CC is ever so slightly more sensitive than the GE and about equal to the Sony 2010. I listened first in the daytime to extremely weak signals...ones where you could just make out what was being said. In this case, the CC and Sony SLIGHTLY outperformed the GE, but without a side by side comparison this would be impossible to notice. With medium strength signals, all 3 radios were about equal. Occasionally a particular frequency would be cleaner on one radio or another but this was random and not something the casual listener would notice. In terms of Selectivity (the ability to separate a weak signal from a strong one on an adjacent frequency), the Sony is the best because it has a narrow bandwidth setting which puts it into a different category from a traditional AM/FM Radio, but again, this narrow bandwidth setting is for serious dx'ers picking extremely weak signals out of a crowded mess, and most casual listeners wouldn't want to listen to the Sony on Narrow because it would be unacceptably muffled. Other than that, the CC Radio was more selective than the GE, allowing me to hear a distant signal on 1350 while ingoring a medium strength station on 1360. I couldn't even find this tation on the GE...it was buried beneath the local station.

I was surprised also at how good the FM reception was. The CC Radio consistently outperformed both the GE and the Sony, primarily because they both tended to bleed stronger FM signals over a wider part of the dial, obliterating weaker signals. It doesn't matter that the CC's antenna is the shrtest of the 3, I picked up several stations on it I couldn't find on the other two becaue the overload, image rejection and selectivity were so much better on the CC. I was truly amazed! Incidentally, I experimented shortening the antennas on the GE and the Sony to see if that would help...it didn't.

I agree with what I've read about the quality of the CC Radio. Many people have noted this, but what I liked the most was that this radio behaves as if it is in perfect alignment. This is all too rare in consumer equipment. Most folks dont realize thatconsumer radios are never aligned as a unit. Rather, each sub-unit is aligned in a test jig to certain tolerences, and when all the pieces are finally assembled, the final unit will meet its specs, but usually the tolerences on these specs is very wide. The CC Radio is the ONLY consumer AM/FM radio I have ever seen that acts like it is in proper alignment. (If you have aligned many radios, you begin to see what improper alignment does. Primarily, it means that all the internal sections aren't perfectly tuned to one another, and the result is that selectivity, sensitivity distortion all can South to varying degrees). I have handled many of the GE Superadio III's, and found they did vary somewhat, with a few clearly out-of-alignment samples, but most okay. The one I used for this comparison was one of the best on AM I have seen.

The ONLY negative I would quibble about is the sound quality. While I admire and respect C.Crane, and find this radio to be an overall delight, I find their feelings about frequency response being tailored for the human voice to be specious. Yes, it's true, the human voice does not comprise as wide of a frequency response as music, and yes, when AM signals are bad, it is good to limit frequency repsonse to limit noise. But when signals are better, this radio unnecessarily muffles the human voice compared with the GE Superadio III and other radios. There's no reason to intrinsically make this radio sound smaller than it is. It could have a full and rich tone, with tone controls available to reduce noise when necessary. The only regret I have about this radio is how inferior it sounds to better sounding radios on reasonable quality signals. If Crane is truly into evolving this product, I hope they will consider this and "open up" the audio quality. Then the CC Radio would truly sing. As it is, it will nevertheless become my daily use radio, and I find it a true joy to own a radio of such fine design and craftsmanship. If you listen to many different stations, the digital tuning alone makes the CC Radio much more flexible than the GE. The GE is still a greatvalue, but it is not as good a radio as the CC.

Similar Products Used:

GE Superadio III, SONY ICF-2010

Quality & Solidity of Build. Sound Quality. Features. Quality of AM, FM, Weather, & TV Reception, Selectivity, Sensitivity. Exceptional Battery Life.

price, size, weight.

I've owned a CCRadio Platinum Edition for just about a year and have been overall pleased with its performance. It's convenience and features are without parallel. I agree with another post here that the sound quality is not quite as good as one would expect, nor as good as the GE SuperRadio or the Optimus 12-604. Additionally, the original CCRadio's AM performance is not quite as good as that of the Optimus 12-604. But... Sangaen and CCrane have come out with a new model, the "CCRadio Plus." Although their claims of improvement are modest, I purchased one and here are my observations... I am really impressed with this new model, the CCRadio Plus. The sound quality is improved, now almost as good as the GE SuperRadio. The feature set has been improved even beyond that of the original CCRadio. There is now FM Stereo with headphones, Aux in and Line out as well as a programmable timer controlled switched contact for controlling an external tape recorder. The new model includes a signal strength meter, enhanced backlight and improved speaker grill cover. The reception is at least as good as the original although the FM reception may be a little more succeptable to multipath distortion than the original mono model. The new unit retails for ten bucks more than the original and is more than worth the differential. This radio is a real winner!! Bravo CCrane! Bravo Sangean!

Similar Products Used:

GE SuperRadio III, RadioShack Optimus 12-604 (SuperRadio Clone), Sangaen ATS-909, Sony ICF-SW7600GR

Sound & fidelity, tuning

only 5 presets for each band

I have owned this almost a year now, and it is by far the best radio I have ever owned. I also have a GE SuperRadio III and a Bose Wave Radio. I would agree with other reviewers that the superradio III can probably pick up as many stations (C Crane even says that), but the digital tuning on the ccradio makes it so much easier to know what frequency you are tuned in at. As I turn the volume up I don't hear any distortion. Voice reproduction is superb. FM reception is above average, and music sounds fine, though not as good as the superradio III. So given that the reception between the two units (ccradio and ge superradio III) is about the same, here is why I'm glad I own ccradio:

1) precise digital tuning
2) no noise or humming... great selectivity
3) sleep timer
4) solidly built -- a great 'primary' radio
5) ability to tune in 1kHz ticks

If the tuner of the superradio III were inside the ccradio, I would probably be just as happy. But it is not, and anyhow who uses a radio frequently will come to appreciate greatly the five things I mention above. It's like comparing a corvette to a chevette. Sure, they will both get you there; but which one is more comfortable and faster?

I think $160 is a fair price. I get the feeling this thing will last a lifetime.

Similar Products Used:

GE superradio III

Fantastic sensitivity and selectivity on AM and FM. Loaded with convenient features.

It is Overpriced. Sound quality is weak. Handle makes me worry about dropping it especially as it is heavy.

First the good, the CCRadio can tune in loads of AM stations. It is also an contains an exceptional FM tuner. The real treat for me are the presets and digital tuning. This just makes the radio so much more convenient, you can easily hop back and forth to other stations during a commercial break to check out whats going on on elsewhere. Great for those times when one is in one of those short attention span phases in their biorhythms. Also killer is the backlight. You can tune this puppy in bed without haveing to switch a lamp on. There are many other little features that make this guy a pleasure to use like the auto power detection for AC/DC. CCrane truly expend a great amount of effort to find out what sort of useful features radio listeners desired. Usually with radios you'll find one radio that has one useful feature and another that pulls in stations like a mother, etc. but never one that has all the great creature comforts and radio performance rolled into one unit until now with the CCRadio.

Now on to the negatives. My biggest complaint with this guy is the audio quality. The fact is that it isn't bad compared with most other radios. The CCRadio sound is just average. You'd figure that with CCrane setting a high standard for the radio performance and feature set that they'd try to maintain a high standard in the audio department as well but hey don't and that is what disappoints. It sounds good through headphones but who wants to listen through the phones if they don't have to.

Another quibble I have with the CCRadio is the handle. You can't get a positive lock with your hand around it like with a strap or bar as on other radios. I think that it is neat that there is no hinged bar to interfere with the antenna, or break off. The feeling leaves one a little insecure about toting the heavy and expensive radio around and really makes one excercis caution when doing so, much like carrying a full cup of hot cocoa upstairs. I think that CCrane should improve on the idea and keep the handle where it is but remove material in the present case to render the current handle into a recessed bar. That way you'd be able to get your thumb around it and not worry about it slipping out of your hand.

The main rival of the CCradio is the GE SuperRadio. The SuperRadio has some of the best audio you'll find on a portable. Listening to music on FM is pleasurable and more important desirable with GE. The CCRadio is weak compared to the GE. The ad copy states that the CCRadio was design for good vocal reproduction as most AM cats listen to talk radio. But while the CCRadio actually handles the audio demands of talk radio decently, the GE is even better at talk too. As far as tuning... I find that the GE can pull in as many stations as the CCRadio. FYI when used with a tunable external loop antenna like the Select-A-Tenna and Terk reception is improved remarkably. Pricewise the GE is only about $40 to $50 making it a C-note cheaper than the CCRadio but the GE lack almost all of the features of the CCRadio.

Overall I use my GE Super Radio more than the CC. as I mainly listen to radio at night when there isn't much good stuff on so I don't have the need for presets usually I'll listen to Phil Hendrie and Art Bell and just keep it locked in. On the weekends during football season however, the CCRadio truly shines allowing me to flip back and forth, with ease due to the presets, between several football games.

If the CCRadio was priced at $100 it'd be a great buy and I'd recommend it to one and all, except those that listen to FM a lot and might want the better fidelity that the GE SuperRadio III gives. At $150 the CCRadio is a little pricey and makes the GE an even more attractive choice. Basically the $150 price tag will make one think about what features of the CC will truly be useful and necessary.

Similar Products Used:

GE SuperRadio, BoseWave, and Kloss 88 and Model 1

Great Reception on AM AND FM

High Priced

Everyone raves about the great AM sensitivity on this radio, and I have confirmed that this is indeed the best radio at picking up distant AM stations. However, no one, even the manufacturer or magazine test reviewers mention how great the FM is at getting distant stations as well! I can get FM stations that my stereo with the outdoor directional antenna can not pick up, and get this... with the telescoping whip antenna on the CCradio all the way down! As a matter of fact, pulling the whip up seems to not really add much to the reception, so I just leave it down. I can't figure out why the great FM reception for distant stations is never mentioned anywhere. It is just as impressive as the AM reception. Too good to be true, as most radios have good FM tuners and really poor AM tuners, and I figured since this radio was mainly designed for AM, that the FM tuner would not have been that great, but it is the best.

Similar Products Used:

Tivoli Model One

Tremendous reception, on both AM and FM, great sound, looks good, and is stable (ie down not fall over easily)

Slightly bigger than I was expecting, but otherwise none at all

I had read the reviews about how good the radio reception was and was slightly sceptical. However, living in an area where reception is very variable, and having struggled for years with various radios and clock radios with those 'antenna in the wire' type arrangements and found poor reception, I thought I would take a chance that all the reviews were indicating something different.

Well, ist TRUE! Never have I been able to listen to a variety of FM stations with the telescopic ariel all the way down..and the AM reception is of course excellent. I would always go back to C.Crane for any radio needs first. I have found the controls very easy to use, the display is clear and relatively easy to read at night without being too bright. I am very impressed.

I am amrking this 5:5 becasue it really does the job better than I have experienced with other products, some of which cost as much if not more. $160 is not cheap for a radio, but if all the others cannot get good reception (however much they cost), then its value for money as far as I am concerned.

Similar Products Used:

Sony Wold Band radios and similar