Others say...

"Best clock radio for my needs but room for improvement"
I've had this clock radio for a couple of weeks and overall have been very pleased with it. I especially like the adjustable dimmer control for the clock so that it is not keeping me awake at night and with the button that switches from the dimmer setting to full-bright, I can see what I need no matter the room lighting conditions. I also like the fact that I can listen to AM talk stations at night with low volume and still have my alarm wake me to my favorite FM station at its own preset.

I was not bothered by the multiple functions for the various controls. It may be confusing for some, but I am used to dealing with these kinds of multi-step processes. Also the fact that it sets for specific days means that I don't need to fuss with the settings as I am on a regular schedule that really doesn't change.

The analog clock is a nice feature as the digital face gives tuner information when the radio is on. I like this.

The radio quality is good for both AM and FM stations. The problem is that the speaker is on the back of the unit and provides more of a room filling sound and not the direct sound pointing at my face which I prefer (as does my girlfriend) for when the alarm goes off in the morning. I solved this with a set of inexpensive powered speakers but would prefer a speaker at the front of the unit.

As I live a few dozen miles from the atomic time clock broadcast center in Colorado, I have no problems whatsoever with the atomic clock finding a signal and syncing up.

I wish the snooze alarm was adjustable, instead of being fixed at five minutes. I already mentioned the speaker location issue I have.

I'm glad I bought it and am sure it will work well in the future.

"Good, but not perfect..."
I like it. It is a keeper.

However, I agree with other reviewers concerning the tricky nature of the controls. My solution: I kept the user manual on the night stand, by the radio, where it was easy to find and refer to. After several weeks, I found myself no longer looking at the manual, nor having to experiment, nor grumbling to myself about the poor design. It's all natural to me now. That said, for forcing me through such a training exercise, I down-graded the thing by one star.

I also agree with comments that the LCD's contrast could be better. However, back-lighting intensity is NOT a problem because it is fully adjustable with a small knob on the bottom of the radio, and switchable between bright and dim by a button on the front. Some reviewers may have not scoured the user manual sufficiently to find those tid-bits of info.

Another complaint I have seen in reviews concerns the presumptive lack of battery back-up and how that makes no sense on a higher-end clock radio. I consider that complaint to be misguided. In fact, it DOES retain settings in a power failure and it does it without requiring user-supplied batteries. I have not dis-assembled the thing to determine the exact method used, but I can guess. These types of electronic devices typically store a small amount of back-up power on an internal gizmo known as a "super capacitor". An alternative, sometimes used, is a very small internal NiCd cell. Whichever it is, this radio demonstrated its stuff during an 18 minute power failure that occurred a few weeks after my purchase. It retained all of the programming and the mechanical clock display spun itself around to the correct time within a minute or so of power being restored. On another occasion, I un-plugged the radio to move it to a different location and noticed that the LCD clock display continued running while un-plugged for that short time. For my money, that's good enough and preferable to having to pay attention to AAA cells that can go bad and leak.

Another complaint I have seen concerns the effectiveness of the "Atomic" aspect of the clock. That can be a problem because the Atomic clock signal is a radio signal that can be interfered with by household appliances, metalic materials in a building and atmospherics. However, of the three Atomic clocks in my house, this radio's clock is the only one that I have not seen get off track on the night of the switch to/from daylight savings time. I believe it is better than most because Sangean made the radio pick-up antenna separable from the radio itself (look at the back of the radio- see the detachable bar?). My antenna is detached and positioned away from 110V power cords and other electronic devices (such as cordless phone, cell phone charger, etc.) that can locally radiate interfering signals. That works for me.

Finally, I like the radio's sensitivity on both AM and FM. It's sound quality is a cut above others in its price range. The rear-firing speaker works better than I might have guessed- sound reflection off the wall works fine. The unique tone control seems to adjust nicely from wide response for decent high and low note rendition on music, to narrow response centered around voice tones. I find the latter to be useful when listening to talk-radio on distant, noisy, weak AM stations.

Summary: I don't think Sangean is very good at human factors engineering, nor are they good at english language technical communication, but I think they do an above average job of designing the innards of a radio.

"well built, badly designed"
OK, the thing is solidly built, sounds good, and gets decent reception. Setting up the alarm is a nightmare and I finally just gave up and use my little quartz clock when I need an alarm. And I am generally good at that stuff. It's that bad. Also, there are three little buttons on the front--see them? The top one is power--not the greatest idea, because you have to grasp the top edge with your finger while you push the button with your thumb (the buttons on top can simply be pushed without rocking the thing backward). But, no biggy, I can live with that. The bottom button brightens the dial with a cool blue light (when not pushed, the light is dimmer, and fully adjustable from dim on up--very nice). So--that is all fine. Now you have the middle, or Devil, button. It is RIGHT NEXT to the power button, mind you, and you will often be using this product in a state of sleepiness. Well, push that button ONCE and it sets a "Nap Alarm". So: You are falling off to sleep and turn off the radio--but accidentally touch that button first. Well, you won't be sleeping for long...

"Great features, weakened by confusing alarm set-up and even more confusing manual"
I'll tackle the drawbacks of this radio in a little bit, but I'll start by listing the good things because that's a fairly long list.

For one thing, if you've ever accidentally overslept because you forgot to do something to your alarm clock the night before, this radio probably takes care of the problem for you:

* "I overslept because the time wasn't set correctly": Clock sets itself to the NIST time signal.
* "I forgot to spring forward/fall back": The NIST time signal includes DST flags.
* "My clock springs forward/falls back, but Congress changed the rules": See previous item. Instead of depending on a hard-wired table, NIST-signal clocks get their "spring forward/fall back" info straight from the horse's mouth, so to speak. If (when) Congress changes the rules again in a couple of years, all of those "auto-set-at-factory" radios with their newly updated built-in DST tables will be messed up again, but NIST-signal clocks will spring and fall right on time.
* "I overslept Monday because I turned off the alarm over the weekend, but forgot to turn it back on again": Both alarms have their own day-of-week settings, so you can set your alarm for M-F and leave it alone over the weekend.
* "I overslept because I left my radio at my normal daytime-listening volume. If it's not wake-the-dead full volume, I sleep right through it": There's an alarm volume switch that's independent of the regular volume switch. IMHO, the person who came up with this feature is a genius. As is the person who came up with the next feature:
* "I overslept because I left my radio on the wrong station the night before": Both alarms have their own radio-preset setting, so alarm 1 can wake you with radio station A and alarm 2 can wake you with radio station B--even if you left the radio on station C at bedtime. Although the biggest genius might be the person responsible for fixing this:
* "I overslept because I set my alarm for a nap yesterday afternoon, and I forgot to reset the alarm afterwards": There's a separate "nap" alarm to wake you up 10-120 minutes from now, independent of the two main alarms. And it's easier to set than the main alarms....

If you oversleep because you routinely hit the snooze button a million times, the radio can't help you there :-)

The alarms themselves are nice, too. The backlight switches from blue to high-beam orange when the alarm goes off. After a few seconds of silence, the radio (or the "Humane Waking System" beeper) starts playing softly, then gradually builds up volume over several seconds. The backlight even switches to low-beam orange when you hit snooze, or back to blue when you switch the alarm off.

Other features:
* The backlight brightness is adjustable; there's a dial on the bottom of the radio. There's also a button on the front to toggle between the current brightness setting and high-beam full brightness.
* The radio has 7 AM presets, 7 FM presets, and a digital radio-frequency display so you don't have to play "Guess That Station" when you're adjusting the dial.
* As someone who used to work overseas, I was pleasantly surprised to see that the power supply was rated for 50 or 60 Hz power. I had to leave my old WWVB radio behind when I lived overseas because it used 60 Hz power like most US clocks. (Quick-and-dirty lesson: US electical systems run at 110-120 volts and 60 Hz, while many other countries run 220-240 volts and 50 Hz. You can run most 110-volt appliances in a 220-volt country by plugging it into a transformer; however, 60-Hz clocks will run slow because you can't transmogrify 50-Hz power into 60-Hz power.) Granted, you probably won't be able to pick up WWVB overseas, and even if you can, the time zones and DST might be wrong, but still...
* This clock displays seconds (my old WWVB clock didn't), which makes it easier to synchronize watches and other clocks to it.

Now for the drawbacks:

A lot of reviewers have complained about the complicated button layout. On one hand, it's not surprising that the controls are more complex than your average alarm clock. After all, your average alarm clock doesn't allow you to set the alarm time *and* day of the week (all seven days, in any combination) *and* "buzzer/music" *and* desired radio station. You also don't have to turn your alarm on and off very often, thanks to all those features I mentioned earlier.

Having said that, when I *do* need to turn my alarm on or off, it takes four or five button pushes even if I'm not changing the time or day settings. And like several reviewers, I need to check the user's manual to see *which* buttons to push. Did the designers fail to test this with end users, or did they intentionally make it non-intuitive so users don't accidentally disable their alarms in a half-asleep fog? :-)

I'm really near-sighted, so I also wish the clock numbers were bigger. The analog clock is a bit easier to read without my glasses, but I wish the hands were thicker, and that they'd move the "atomic time" logo out of the analog clock. It's hard to tell the difference between the minute-hand blurry blob, the second-hand blurry blob, and the atomic-time logo blurry blob!

Another unintuitive feature: setting an alarm's radio station is a separate process (with a different button-pushing sequence) from changing the alarm's date/time/buzzer-music-disable settings. Granted, this may be a Good Thing since I imagine most people change their alarm's radio station less frequently than the other settings. But you still need the user's manual to do it.

And speaking of the user's manual, the other reviewers are right--it needs a lot of work. Several reviewers reported that their clocks didn't work correctly, but I wonder how many of those problems occurred because the reviewer couldn't make heads or tails of the manual! Here are my suggestions:
* More pictures, more pictures, more pictures! There's two or three illustrations at the beginning of the manual that identify all of the buttons, dials, and indicators, and all of the instructions refer to those illustrations. The instructions would probably be easier to understand if key steps were also illustrated.
* I'd also like descriptions of each symbol on the display and front panel. *Especially* the alarm indicators ("D" in the illustrations)--I had to experiment to figure out which symbols meant what.
* I get the feeling the text was imperfectly translated from another language, because the language was awkward in spots (although not as awkward as some translations I've read).
* Because the radio has so many features, the user's manual could use a table of contents.
* Assuming your radio can pick up the NIST signal, is it possible to disable DST for places like Arizona that stay on ST year-round? There's a section describing how to toggle DST, but I *think* it's intended to simplify springing/falling if you're setting the clock manually. (This is one instance where the awkward-language problem got in the way.)
* The features list and illustrations refer to "LW/MW/FM" and 21 radio pre-sets, instead of "AM/FM" and 14 pre-sets. (The rest of the manual gets it right.)

Conclusion: Your Mileage May Vary. I strongly recommend downloading the manual from the "Product Details" section or the Sangean web site before you buy, because your rating will probably depend on it:
* If you can decipher the user's manual well enough to figure out how to use all of the really cool features: 4 stars.
* If you can't decipher the manual: 3 stars if you're lucky.
* If Sangean fixes the manual: 4.5 or 5 stars.
* If Sangean fixes the manual *and* makes alarm setting more intuitive: 5 stars.

"Lovely piece of industrial design"
This is a lovely piece of industrial design. One of the nicest objects I ever bought.

An unusual level of care seems to have gone into the physical package: so elegant that one can enjoy simply looking at it; no blinking clutter. The analog clock is easy to read in the middle of the night without putting on glasses (the quality I was most searching for in a clock/radio) even with the adjustable illumination set low enough as to not be annoyance when trying to sleep. The buttons are positioned and raised in a way that makes them easy to identify by touch. Love the way the clock glow changes from blue to orange when the alarm is triggered.

The radio pulls in distant AM and FM stations well and has very pleasant sound.

The clock locked onto the NIST time signal within a few minutes of first being plugging in.

As other reviews here describe, setting the alarm can be quite complicated - even after re-reading the cryptic instruction sheet many times over. Kind of a shame. If the designers had gotten that feature a bit better, this thing would be perfect.