PLUS
Good sound
Great price
Stylish looking

MINUS
Basic i-radio features
Weak user interface

The Sanyo R227 has stereo capability right out of the box, and it's attractively priced, with a list price of $220.

The speaker grilles are at each end of the compact cabinet, which means you don't get a true stereo experience. Still, this radio sounds surprisingly good. Some might say the R227's sound is a little too warm, but we found this radio very comfortable to listen to for long periods, exactly because it's never tinny- or overly bright-sounding.

We also like the look of the R227. It's finished in piano black and brushed steel, with one of the biggest and brightest screens. And it doesn't have a rigid telescoping FM antenna as all the others do, just a dipole (wire). Rigid antennas may be more robust, but they limit where you can place the radio; it's tough to put it on a bookshelf with a shelf above, for example, because there's no room for the antenna to extend.

As an i-radio, the R227 worked well enough. In late June, Sanyo Canada's Website said the station director for the R227 contained 16,919 stations and 21,242 on-demand streams.

The R227, however, lacks some of nice i-radio features offered on some competing models. You can browse stations by genre or location, for example, but within each location or genre, stations are simply listed alphabetically, often only by call letters, which means you have to know what you're looking for. There are also no listings of recently tuned stations, new stations added to the database or favorites - your own or other people's. You can't search for stations.

We had some frustration with its media player features, which let you stream music stored on PCs on your home network. Each time you enter Media Player mode, you have to select the option to scan for PCs on the network. On other i-radios, this happens automatically; or the list of PCs is saved from one session to the next.

Sometimes the R227 found PCs, sometimes not. Each time it found our main test system, it needed to scan its folders. It would start this process, but invariably lost the network connection and had to re-establish it before continuing. We were never able to display tracks in the main music folder. Again, this is likely at least partly a Media Player or Windows Vista issue. We had similar, though in some cases not as severe, problems with all these products.

As an FM radio, the R227 is fine in terms of clarity of reception. Its seek function found 11 stations in my area, including CBC Radio One, which some others could not find despite its strong signal. The Sanyo radio also has a 3.5mm auxiliary input that allows you to connect from the earphone port on any music source and use the R227 as an external speaker system.

The R227's one notable failing: a badly designed user interface. The wireless remote features small, poorly organized keys. The Select key is at the top while the Scroll keys (only up and down) are at the bottom, for example. Given that most digital devices feature four-way navigation keys with a Select button in the middle, the R227 arrangement is counter-intuitive.

The controls on the front of the radio include a big jog-shuttle dial for scrolling menus and lists, which is good. But some other function keys - such as Volume Up and Down, Snooze and radio presets are thin arching buttons surrounding the dial. They appear randomly placed and we found them difficult to manipulate.

All this being said, the user interface is not the most important criteria for evaluation. You can get used to a bad interface, but it's tough to live with bad sound.

Simple setup was easy and worked first time. We did of course have to prepare the network router by telling it the R227's MAC address. The photocopied user's manual we received (the R227 is a brand-new product; the review sample was a preproduction unit) did explain where to find the MAC address and even gave generic instructions on setting up MAC address filtering.

Bottom line: if you're on a budget and want something that looks and sounds great, the R227 is a good bet. Other models offer better i-radio functionality, easier-to-use interfaces and more features, but the fundamentals with this one are solid, and the price is right.

Article Tags:  Sanyo, R227,Internet, radio, stations, network, interface, media, player, stereo