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Pure DTM-300
Pure Digital have been in the forefront of DAB radio in this century. The DTM-300 is probably a design icon rather like their 'Bug' that was designed by Wayne Hemingway.
Maybe it's me and it just looks stylish, I can see this unit sitting proudly in a office unit, the main feature making this suitable is it's lack of depth. It is 44cm wide, 28cm tall and only 16cm deep.
This is an all in one unit with the speakers at the sides and the central portion being the radio and CD unit as well as the controls. It does of course come with the near obligatory remote control but everything is workable from the controls on the unit.
There is a double sided A4 sheet that is the getting started guide and that is probably sufficient to get most people up and running. There is also a sixteen page well illustrated and laid out manual to answer those other questions.
I suspect the longest job on removing this unit from it's box is inserting the two provided AA batteries in the remote control. The power lead and wire aerial are both in the same plastic bag and that's it. Plug in the power lead extend the aerial and press the power button on top of the unit, by default it tunes the DAB stations, currently playing the first found station at a reasonable level.
The top of the unit has eight small round buttons, two triangular shaped buttons and two larger round buttons. Towards the rear of the face is a 8x2cm LED display and under that are three further push buttons the first to toggle between DAB/FM radio the second for Auxiliary input and the third to change the information displayed on the LED. These buttons can control all actions of the unit, they are duplicated on the 33 button remote control, this is designed with 13 buttons on top to control the CD and the other 20 on a slide out section as they are likely to be used less often.
Providing you leave the unit in standby then the inbuilt clock keeps time and also can be used as an alarm and or a sleep timer. I was somewhat surprised that I needed to set this as most modern units take the time from radio beacons.
I have around 50 DAB stations in my area but before you purchase a DAB radio it's a good idea to check likely reception in your locale by entering your postcode at www.ukdigitalradio.com to check the likely reception.
You can store up to nine DAB stations on presets and while changing channels is quick, having your favourites on easy access buttons is useful.
It is also possible to store nine FM stations as well and this is likely to be more important as manual tuning of stations on the FM band is slower and also requires you to remember the frequency of the station.
The unit plays not only audio CD's but also CD's of MP3 music even those in nested folders. The actual CD player is the top part of the centre of the unit with the electric door moving down to allow insertion or removal of CD's.
On my own audio centre I have no choice of information displayed - track elapsed - whereas on my previous unit I could display a variety of information and here you can have track elapsed, track remain or disc remain. During my review period I used this unit and played CD's through it as well as listening to both DAB and FM radio, I was pleasantly surprised at the speakers quality given the fact they were quite close together. The Pure DTM-300 is available from Amazon for £183.24 :
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