I always bring to work a Cowon iAudio M5 storing the duplicate of my digital music collection. One year ago, the 20GB iAudio M5 was one of the last hard-disk portable players I could locate in Switzerland that would support codecs for MP3, (Ogg) Vorbis, WMA and WAV. I had purchased a pair of JLB Duet speakers to listen to the iAudio at work, but having bought a Zareason Shuttle desktop computer in October 2008, I resolved to using the speakers on the Linux box and finding another means of outputting music from the iAudio.
I had used a Creative Soundworks surround computer speaker set in the past, so I knew about their expertise in producing compact high-quality speakers. I set my choice on their SoundWorks Radio 705, a radio that can also be used as a mono loudspeaker. Made by Cambridge Soundworks, the Massachusetts loudspeaker manufacturer who joined Creative Technology in 1996, the 705 is an analog AM & FM radio built for those seeking a device with no frills. In fact, Cambridge Soundworks seems to have followed the philosophy of Tivoli, a electronics company famous for its retro-styled radios. I opted for the white iPod-like colour.
The 705 is minimalist by design: it doesn’t even features a clock. It comes in a shining polymer shell and features 4 knobs and 1 button: frequency tuning, volume, AM/FM or auxiliary source, tone setting (balance/treble) and power. There are individual plugs for cable antenna, earphones, input, output and power cable. I have had the opportunity to look at similar radios, and none featured other plugs besides the earphones. In my case, a cable antenna, one British and one continental power cable and a jack cable came wih the package. The power adapter is included in the casing, which brings the weight to 2.0 kg and makes the device feel sturdy.
My office is located in a remote Swiss valley and I could measure who much better the cable was antenna in picking up signals compared to a standard telescopic antenna. Fine tuning the receiver is very easy, thanks to the tuning aid. Three LEDs located left of the knob serve as a visual cue of signal strength. The knob rotation is demultiplicated by a gear, leading the disk marked with frequencies to rotate slower than the knob. I find that this is the cleverest feature of the device.
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| near | good signal | best signal |
Measuring 212 x 130 x 160 mm and rated at 7 Watts RMS (± 30 audio Watts), the mono loudspeaker produces a sharp sound clear enough to be pumped beyond reasonable limits, but fails to reproduce the low frequencies. The input plugs allows for using it as an auxiliary loudspeaker and the output plug, which probably has a different impedance than the earphones plug, allows to integrate it with other components.
I have no experience of Tivoli’s radios, but this is the second Creative product I end up satisfied with. The Creative SoundWorks Radio 705 is a stylish and well-designed non-nonsense radio.
Photographs and user manual are published by Creative.
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