Passable if your signal is strong

1) Not very sensitive. I live near High Wycombe, not I think an area of high signal strength, but hardly out in the sticks. The unit sometimes struggles to auto-tune, and reception is somewhat hissy. It is necessary to position the radio relative to the phones (i.e. to your head) carefully to get reasonable reception. I judge it adequate for listening to speech while sitting down, marginal for music, and not acceptable for use with the radio in the pocket while moving about.
On the other hand, the phone cable can never be the ideal aerial and I am not sure that any FM"personal radio" can perform wonderfully except very close to a transmitter. I had a similar, much more expensive (Sharp) personal radio that did better, but far from perfectly.

2) Change the batteries and it seems to forget all its pre-sets and the time unless you are very quick. Battery life is not great, but the good news is that it runs fine on (NiMH) rechargables! An interesting feature is that when the batteries run down it does not switch itself off - the sound simply cracks up. Once you have got used to it, this is maybe better - you are not cut off in mid sentence or song. However, I do not know if this means that it runs the batteries down lower than is good for rechargables.

3) The unit detects signal strength and switch to stereo when it is high enough. There is no way of over-riding of this. Stupidly, the levels at which it switches in and out of stereo seem identical (no hysteresis). So, disconcertingly sometimes switches in and out of stereo at a rapid rate if the signal is marginal - most disconcerting. The designer should be shot - no make that politically correct - fired.

So my overall verdict is passable for quite a cheap unit, if its limitations are acceptable. (They seem to have made quite al lot of changes to cost and P&P lately - I paid significantly more for both - rats!)

good value for money.... but

As soon as i got the speakers i eagerly tested them with the batteries and also using the mains.
i was pleasantly surprised at how long the power lasts with the batteries i used (1000mAh uniross rechargeables) and the sound quality and volume produced.
Definitely a must buy for your ipod if you have a strict budget, definitely value for money.
A pity about the design of the docking base... absolutely useless as it's impossible for the ipod to sit in the way the image displays with the jack connecting at the bottom, sticking out.

It really deserves a 5 star rating if it wasn't for the poor design of the docking base!

Does what it says on the tin

I wanted a bed-side table size CD/radio/tape player. This one does the job really well, without looking bulky or ugly. The sound quality is very good - my spoken word BBC version of the Hobbit sounded really vibrant. Recommended.

Why so few reviews for this?

There is no option to tinker with the sound settings - fortunately sound quality beats any other personal device of any sort I have ever owned. Its the best! Pop/rock etc is clear, bass is rumbly and midrange bright. It takes classical music to a new level for me. And, speach clear and authentic.There is a flywheel which accesses stations and settings. It is designed for right handers, but lefties will manage. The main text is nice and clear. The scrolling text is slightly blurry, but readable. You can opt to put the scolling text into the main window. The amber backlight looks cool and works well. I went straight to rechargables and always carry spares - that seems to be a common DAB issue. Battery life is better than the Bush I tried. Reception is fine - I live in Fife. Bizarrely, Radio Scotland can be patchy, but everything else is great. That's a broadcast issue. Reception then, is slightly better than the best of my other DAB radios. I'm amazed that this little chap hasn't attracted more review attention. For me, its glued to my ears every chance I get. If it has a fault, its that DAB broadcast isn't as good and as widespread as it needs to be. Not Roberts' fault, and its an issue which will affect any DAB unit. The RD 14 lives up to what I hoped DAB could be and I love it!

Just what I was looking for

As I travel a lot and like to listen to world service I was looking for a small portable radio, with a built in alarm clock but which also received short wave. Thats easier said than done as radios seem to have gone out of fashion and everyone seems to sell gadgets with too many features. This radio fitted my requirements perfectly, its lightweight, tiny, folds in 2 so is more resistant to falling on the floor, has a little snooze light so you can check the time in the dark and gets excellent short wave reception. You don't even have to change the time as you tell it the time zone and the time adujsts automatically.

What I really liked is that everything is manual, no annoying electronic features that take you 4 hours reading the manual. The sound quality is also very good for such a small device and certainly sufficent for world service, though probably not for someone who really wants to focus on music. I bought this for a studying holiday in Rome and it really served its purpose of allowing me to listen to the local radio and foreign stations, it now travels with me everywhere. The only negative point I can think of is that the noise of the alarm is very irritating but then perhaps its supposed to be.

Misrepresented radio?

Be careful ordering this radio on the Amazon site. You will find if you look that there are two Sony SRF M37 Personal radios advertised by Amazon, and they are in fact different!!?? I thought I had ordered the Sony SRF-M37 with 'long wave' radio, as recommended by John Friel, but this was NOT the radio I was supplied with. Instead, as M Van der Velde says in his review I got an AM/FM radio designed for the US market, presumably manufactured for when the US was due to convert to digital signals. This meant it included a 'TV' channel band, and a weather band, both of which actually appear to do nothing in the UK. I have given the radio two stars, because it does work reasonably well as an AM/FM radio, but this is just me being generous. The radio I ordered should have had long wave (for the cricket mainly) and this one doesn't, so I have been sold a pup. I am in the process of complaining to Amazon, who hopefully will adjust their advertising and realise the mistake they have made!

Rather bright for my taste but my 10 year old son loves it

My son wanted a portable boom box for his 10th birthday. He has a CD collection, of things like School Disco and Rock Legends compilations, rather than cassettes. I was attracted to this player as the Amazon listing said it played MP3's - burned onto CD's I assumed - but actually it doesn't play MP3s at all - it's commercial CDs or CDR and CDRW audio recordings only. There is a tape player that can record from the CD or analogue radio but sadly there's no inbuilt microphone for fun voice recordings. Sound from the tape player is fine on tapes recorded from my HIFI system (naturally there's no Dolby B/C decoder and its Type I normal tapes only). The radio works fairly well and is LW, MW and FM.

My son really likes this good looking player, particularly the natty simple but effective remote control [not the same as the larger remote now shown by Amazon in their stock photo] - although very meanly, Sony didn't provide the 2 AAA batteries we needed to use it. The player itself can be run on six R14 (size C) batteries, which would further increase it's very weighty feel to a wapping 3.1 kg. These batteries aren't supplied either, but in this case you have the mains lead. On alkaline batteries Sony say the unit will playback CD's for 7 hours and tapes for 15 hours (probably optimistic). The main units battery cover is easy to remove as well, so rechargeable batteries wouldn't be a problem, other than most chargers only hold four batteries per go. There's no lines in for recording or replay either - so you can't use the system as active speakers for your MP3 player, another missed opportunity. You almost certainly can't use a Sony CP-A9 car adapter kit either as the cassette door is very tight fitting. The unit is also quite large really for a system touted as 'super compact', having a footprint of 400 cm x 250 cm deep (with the mains lead inserted).

Controls for the CD and radio are 'electronic' and have a positive if slightly tacky feel. The cassette tape controls are the very old fashioned heavy clunky push mechanical type, but they feel fine in use. Solenoid ones would have been much nicer though, and would have allowed the remote control to control the tape functions - it can't, other than switch to CD or radio with the tape still playing. The tape has auto-stop on play/fastwind plus CD record synch, but no auto-reverse. The remote works fully only with the radio, CD and volume. CD and tape eject is a slick damped affair, although the CD load mechanism is rather over complicated.

Sound wise the player is a disappointment to me as it is very bright sounding, even through my old ears. Also annoyingly there is no equalisation at all - a series of preset ones like on MP3 players really should have been provided, as there is a reasonable, but annoyingly not backlit, LCD display suitable for a menu system. You do have the 'Mega Bass' button which does add a more pleasant weight to the sound, although I would have still liked to have been able to reduce the treble. The unit goes very loud, although this exaggerates the treble as well as the base. Being bright, the sound is also quite detailed though. The headphone socket works well and probably suites cheaper MP3 type player headphones around £30 that have good midrange but a more limited treble. The otherwise awful Sony MDR-V300 headphones that are all bass and no treble don't sound that bad with the unit. However my son (who can no doubt hear far further up the treble region than me) thinks the sound via speakers and headphones is great and he is very happy with the system. I told him he could send it back - but no, he is delighted with it. So although I don't really feel I could fully recommend the unit (largely due to the lack of any equalisation control outside the Mega Bass and it's rather Spartan features), it obviously suites some tastes, and I have to admit it looks good. We paid £79 from Amazon, although if the price has dropped it makes it better value.

An elegant replacement for an old radio/CD/cassette player...

We are really pleased with this radio/CD/SD player. It steals some of its retro style from the Old B&O hifi sets but that isn't a bad thing. There are some nice touches like a selection of colours for the lit display, and the way the front tilts forward to accept CDs.

It is pleasingly solid in design - far better than the Chronos by PURE (which you would expect from the different price tag!) and unlike most of the competition, has a series of graphic equaliser presets and adjustable treble and base (via the user preset). High quality, clean sound is provided by a hidden 3-way speaker system, and is fairly powerful considering the unit's size.

My one criticism of this item is that it has no record to SD function, unlike the newer Roberts radio set such as the Sound 41. This means I have either to by a Sound 41 as well, or continue recording programmes from the Listen Again web pages using Audacity and transfer them to SD or CD for playback on the Sound 41. For this reason, I'll give it 4 stars instead of 5. However, I'm sure Roberts will bring out a new version of this soon with recording facility.

One further niggle: the SD slot will only accept cards formatted in FAT (not FAT 32 or NTFS). This means that you are limited to using maximum 2GB cards and no SDHC compatibility.