Tangent Quattro MKII review

Tangent Quattro MKII Review

Reviewed by: Nate Lanxon

Reviewed on: 5 March 2008

When you hear 'Internet radio', don't just think of the oddities found inside iTunes' rather rococo radio list. A decent tabletop Internet radio, however, will give you access to major British broadcasts from the likes of the BBC, along with thousands of channels from around the world.

That's what Tangent's Quattro MKII offers -- mainstream radio, worldwide broadcasts and podcasts delivered to your table or bedside, either via Ethernet or Wi-Fi. But with a price of £170, would you be better off with a DAB radio by your bed and podcasts on your iPod? Before you answer, let's see what Tangent is offering.

Design
This attractive, weighty offering is housed inside a wooden enclosure, finished in a choice of colours. To the top sits a single 76mm (3-inch) dynamic driver, capable of driving 5W RMS. You may miss it at first, but there's also a tiny snooze button for telling Chris Moyles to shut up. You'll certainly miss the infrared remote control, because there isn't one -- a big shame.

Independent volume and tuning knobs sit on the front, accompanying a plethora of function buttons and a two-line backlit LCD display. Around the back are Ethernet, line-in, line-out and headphone sockets. Why is the headphone socket around the back? Lines in and out, fair enough. But headphones?

Features
Despite the headphone-related oversight, the Quattro's feature list impresses. At the time of writing, it lists just over 10,000 radio stations from 270 countries. This gives you access to fascinating international talk and music radio -- excellent if you're interested in foreign languages and cultures. You can further sub-catagorise stations by genre and assign any station to one of six presets.

There's plenty of on-demand content on offer from traditional broadcasters, and any BBC Radio fan will be impressed with being able to access the last seven days' worth of broadcasts from many stations, including Radio 1, 6 Music and Radio 4. Missed Edith Bowman's show last Wednesday? Fancy a catch-up of The Archers? No worries -- they're here in their entirety. The database of stations is pulled from the Reciva Web site every time the Quattro is used, so you've always got an up-to-date directory. Podcast support is extremely intuitive and utilises the Web site too. We'll come to this shortly.

You can also access media stored on PCs hooked up to your home network, either by setting up a UPnP server or by configuring Windows Media Player to grant access to files in its library to associated devices on the network. The Quattro will play MP3, AAC, OGG, WAV, WMA, Real Audio and AIFF formats -- an excellent offering, but where's FLAC?

Also nowhere to be seen is support for DRMed Windows Media files -- not that we recommend buying music with DRM, but support for it wouldn't have gone unappreciated. And we would have loved an SD card slot for recording purposes -- PURE Digital's one-touch SD card recording on the Legato II, for example, was a very useful feature.

Performance
We initially had problems with streaming audio along our local networks, possibly as a result of using our corporate LAN. We had various permissions errors, and unpredictable and sporadic success at even accessing our media-filled PC. After giving up trying to use Windows Media Player, as advised by the Quattro's manual (we don't like having to resort to looking at manuals by the way), we created a simple folder of music on the PC's desktop, set it as a shared folder and things finally worked.