Customer Reviews

Revo SuperConnect Multi Format Deluxe Table Radio

A superb radio in many respects. Brilliant sound quality, excellent radio reception, exceptionally versatile. All this should be enough to merit a five star rating. Unfortunately there are too many serious frustrations in use to give more than four stars. Hopefully most of these can be sorted out in future software upgrades.
Digital radio quality is excellent, during the first couple of days use the digital radio would suddenly stop for no apparent reason. This has not happened since and I suspect that I had inadvertently activated the rather strangely implemented "snooze" function. Reception seems better than the Pure Evoke I previously used. Fm has not been used much but again reception and sound quality are very good.
Internet radio would be good if not for the serious deficiencies in the interface. The Owner's Guide claims that the BBC option is a shortcut to the entire BBC station list. This is far from the case, I haven't done an exhaustive check but although the main national stations are all present, there is no Radio Scotland, Tees or Humberside to name but three I have noticed of BBC local stations. They can be found by searching but it shouldn't be that complicated. Much of the problem seems to stem from the Frontier Silicon Radio Portal used. For example currently in the BBC Radio 2 podcast list the Bob Harris Country is in the list but no Bob Harris Sunday, this has been the case for the month I have had the radio. Although Bob Harris Country is is in the menu if selected it tells you there are no shows. Using the Frontier Silicon Radio website a search for Bob Harris podcasts again gives you only the country show but this time it comes up with two shows, the correct January 2nd programme but also for some reason Harry Shearers Spinal Tap which followed it. There is a link for Mike Harding's Folk Show which hasn't been broadcast for over a year. It really is a shambles.

Problems don't end there. Once you have found what you want to listen to the stream will often play for a few minutes and then stop. If you restart you go back to the beginning again, yes you can fast forward to get back to where you were but it takes far too long. The fast forward starts on +1 eventually move to +2, +4, +8, +32 but at each step there is a long delay with the result that it will take several minutes to move a programme on 30 minutes. Another review has suggested this problem is the result of the buffer being too low when streaming starts and can be partly overcome by pausing at start. I have not so far found this very effective.

Streaming from a PC works very well but is difficult to use with a large music collection such as mine. The music can be accessed in various ways, artist, album, genre etc. Each leads to a list in alphabetical order, which then has to scrolled through to find what you want. As the only way to scroll seems to be one click of the joystick at a time it takes a very long time to scroll through a large list. When you find an artist or album you want to play tracks are listed in alphabetical order and appear to have to be played in that order, I have found no option to shuffle the tracks. Obviously the way round this is to create playlists first but this seems to introduce an extra step if I decide on the spur of the moment I want to listen to a bit of Richard Thompson or Van Morrison.
As a result of these problems I have listened mainly using Spotify Connect . This works very well, with only an occasional stutter (which may well be down to the android tablet I use to run the Spotify app). My only complaint here is a minor one, to see info about a track playing such as the artists name requires a press of info button. This has to done for each track, where as I would have expected the display preference to be retained for subsequent tracks.

I have no hesitation in recommending the Superconnect, but I am a little disappointed that at present it is only Super and not Fantastic.

Revo Superconnect is a fitting flagship product for Revo Technologies – it is a high end table-top radio that looks extremely elegant and refined and has high definition sound quality – of the sort that can go effortlessly from a whisper to a roar and sounds as good for music as it does for voice.

And under the retro-look, Superconnect hides high-tech sophistication that delivers bundles of modern connectivity options including wi-fi and Bluetooth as well as the standard DAB and FM options.

Superconnect comes in a large box with foam padding – the luxury walnut wood finish and chrome grill are well shielded from damage in transit and removing the radio from the box, it feels heavy and substantial. It also feels robust and well built. Superconnect also comes with a substantial remote control – made from matt black plastic, it is big and quite heavy with well sized, substantial buttons – you will notice the remote control but it doesn’t feel like an afterthought either.

Removing the radio from the box, it was easy to set up and get working – a set-up wizard helps to guide you through the process of getting connected – it carries out an auto-scan of available DAB settings and helps connect the radio to a wifi network – it has a WPS facility which makes connecting it to a WPS equipped router a trivially easy task. I was up and running in minutes and listening to DAB and internet radio stations.

Superconnect has its own built in EQ function along with a Loudness control – the EQ has a selection of presets but also allows you to configure your own EQ preference by adjusting bass and treble levels.

Navigating Superconnect is mostly easy – the joystick from the previous Heritage has been improved and a Select button placed just below the joystick – this makes it very easy to navigate through station selections and menu options using the joystick and I was surprised at just how well this feature has been improved.

There was one shortcoming here though. Superconnect has a snooze feature which is activated by touching the metal grille whilst the alarm is sounding. It works very well, but unfortunately this doesn't work (-although I was assured it would) for the Sleep function. The sleep function is hidden behind two menu selections and navigating to this is clunky and awkward. Shame - the Heritage had a snooze/sleep bar and as Superconnect doesn't even have a dedicated sleep button on the remote control this is a real oversight - I'd like to hope Revo can address this through a software update.

Superconnect has Bluetooth functionality - this is a revelation in terms of sound quality and means its easy to stream content from a mobile device in high quality sound. On the weekend I took delivery of my Superconnect the Silicon Frontier web portal that's used for the internet radio was down and I could not register my radio - the Bluetooth function was a lifesaver as it allowed me to stream radio stations from my Tune In application - and from the BBC Listen Again radio app - all in very high quality.

One of the reasons I bought Superconnect was its Spotify connectivity. This is a revelation and was extremely easy to set up once I realised that the included manual instructions were actually too complicated. With Superconnect and mobile device ( with Spotify application) connected to the same wifi network, playing a Spotify track on the mobile device will automatically bring up the Superconnect Radio as an option to stream to. It's as easy as that and in practice works almost seamlessly with very little delay.

Listen Again functionality through the Silicon Frontier portal works very well in Internet Radio mode - Superconnect has a pause button too which works when playing back content and is useful for filling up the buffer on WMA podcastt streams - it would have been good for Superconnect to do this automatically as if the buffer is low when streaming starts, the stream can disconnect. However so far I've had better success playing Listen Again WMA streams back on Superconnect than with other radios.

Superconnect also allows you to set up two alarms and the LED display on the radio can be dimmed in standby mode -I have it next to my bed and the LED doesn't distract me or keep me awake.

All in all this is an exquisite radio- it oozes quality in the attention to its looks and the high quality of the build - and it sounds fantastic playing speech or music. The connectivity options are just brilliant and well implemented - there are some grumbles but they are very minor- the lost sleep function, the fact that you have to switch the radio into Bluetooth mode and that the WMA Listen Again streams could have a larger automatic buffer fill. On a radio like this these are all minor niggles and all could be addressed by future software upgrades.

I highly recommend this radio to anyone who wants a really special listening product - it is worthy of pride of place anywhere and is practically guaranteed to impress. Well done Revo...

The Revo has done almost everything it promises, almost all the time. I have lost the wifi connection twice so that Internet radio became temporarily unavailable, but managed to recover it. Reason for loss not known. Revo technical telephone support has been very good ( they answered the phone on first ring) and guided me on how to reconnect. Sound quality of Revo is very good.

This is my second Revo product in our household and I happily recommend the company and its products.

The radio itself is beautiful and works great. Installation is easy, plug and play. Unfortunatelly, playing your own music collection (NAS etc) is not easy. Since you have to scroll manually for minutes before you reach your desired artist, genre etc. And after confirming your selection, don't try to pause it for too long, because it will stop and you will be back at your start screen. Again you have to scroll through your long list again and you don't wanna do that. Listening to a few albums from your own music collection and then switching to DAB, Spotify or FM and then returning to your own network and, again you will have to scroll your way back to your desired music. This is strange, since the competition (SONOS, Freecom etc etc) allready has the solution there. It lets you scroll through the alfabet very easily, reducing your hand scroll action for many minutes. And it remembers where you left off and restart where you ended your last playback. So Revo; with the next update; solve this problem and then this is a five star SuperRadio!