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Pure Elan II
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The Pure Elan II measures 38.5x15.5x10cm (without the rod aerial extended), the six piece rod aerial fully extended will add 64cm to the last figure the height. The whole unit apart from the silvered handle ends and the control area on the top is a wonderful matt black so if you have this in the kitchen no finger marks are likely to show as they do with a shiny surface.
It can be run on batteries or even a Pure ChargePak (optional accessory) however most of my tests were run on mains power.
The rear has Auxiliary input and headphone output as well as micro USB on the right side with the DC input on the left. The base and both sides are clear. The front has the matt black matching grill covering the twin speakers.
The top has ten small silvered buttons and two larger turn silvered knobs in the centre is a 6x2cm display that shows three lines of information blue on light grey when the backlight is on, otherwise it is black on a darker grey but quite readable unless you are in near darkness then you only need to touch either of the turn knobs to get the display to light for seven seconds the default setting.
On first switch on you get a chance to set Energy Saving mode and then it does an Autotune in my case it found 58 DAB stations. Press the DAB/FM/Aux button to toggle to FM and unlike a lot of units you are not immediately hit by a volley of static twist the tune knob and it starts climbing the band and stops at the first station and just press one of the Preset buttons for a couple of seconds if you wish to save it. All together you have 50 presets available 25 each for DAB and FM.
There is a 16page Owners Manual – joy of joys – totally in English, this tells you in simple steps with lots of illustrations how to do everything including how to save presets beyond the five one touch buttons.
ReVu allows you to pause and then rewind or fast forward, great for when the phone rings and you were listening to a play or discussion, up to around ten minutes.
A few words on the rear connectors the USB socket is for software upgrades, the headphone socket is to allow you to listen without disturbing others and the Auxiliary Input is so you can output anything with a 3.5 lead through the speakers of the Pure Elan II, your iPod or MP3 will sound a lot better than through your earbuds.
The third line of the display can be Scrolling Text, Data, Signal Strength or Signal Quality. Intellitext and RuVu are both explained in detail in the manual.
Of course this unit has alarms and sleep timer but also a kitchen timer the latter ideal when trying to time something. The alarm choices are one off, daily, weekday or weekend. The sleep timer can be set for anything between 15 and 90 minutes.
The basic sound of the unit is good, crisp and sharp but if this is not your choice you can change both the treble and or bass -5 to +5 from the default setting of 0. I was somewhat surprised to find that the speakers are only 2.5W RMS per channel so 5W total. The sound given certainly sounds more powerful than that to me.
My only wish is to be able to record to SD card as you can with some other Pure units.
Doing my Internet searches found the Pure Elan II at a best price of £91.77 including free delivery from the first link below.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B002OOWBW0?ie=UTF8&tag=gadge0a-21&linkCode=as2&camp=1634
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