PURE Digital Chronos review

Sound quality from the built-in speaker is fair. Clarity and tone was certainly comparable to what we hear each morning from our ageing FM alarm clock. Plugging in headphones demonstrated something rather impressive: the Chronos doesn't sound too far off what you'd expect from a dedicated professional unit like the Sony ST-SDB900. This isn't hugely surprising given that the weakest link in the DAB chain at the moment is not the receivers, but the quality of the transmissions.

There's a slight lack of warmth to the tone, but who in their right mind is an audiophile at 7am? For half-awake-listening the Chronos more than suffices.

Wonderfully, you can set the alarm on the Chronos to wake you up during weekdays but let you peacefully slumber at the weekends. There's even the option to set four independent alarms with different preferences on each day. If you're lucky enough to start later on certain days, you can pre-programme the Chronos to match your lifestyle and then never feel compelled to fiddle with it again.

Weaknesses
No provision for battery operation makes the Chronos a static device designed to stay rooted to your bedside table. You could plausibly take the Chronos on holiday, but not all European countries use the same DAB frequencies as we do in the UK.

The Chronos has no fall back to FM or AM transmissions -- it's DAB or nothing. For this reason you'll want to make sure that the DAB reception in your area is good enough for the radio to lock to a strong signal. Anything less and you'll curse the thing for all eternity.

Remember that the room you use the Chronos in will need to be served well by a DAB transmitter to pick up radio using a small aerial -- it might be worth checking this with a friend's DAB. Londoners and other major city-dwellers can be fairly confident of good reception, but rural areas occasionally suffer from poor coverage.

Conclusion
Bedside radio alarm clocks are the least glamourous objects imaginable, ranking alongside disposable razors or rubber bands in the thrill stakes. It's a small miracle, then, that PURE Digital has nudged the Chronos into territory that a more pliant reviewer might call sexy. You may pay a premium for what's on offer here, but many users will earn it right back in hassle-free operation. Since your alarm clock is going to be the first thing you lay eyes on most mornings, maybe it's worth buying something attractive?

It's interesting that of all the DABs we've tested at CNET, the Chronos seems the most logical use of the DAB signal. While we've consistently bemoaned the poor bit rate of DAB for concentrated listening, for applications like this, where simplicity and convenience are far more important than audio fidelity, the digital format shines.

Edited by Mary Lojkine
Additional editing by Kate Macefield