Tivoli's Web Radio: Well-Made but Costly

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Either way, you can expect to scroll through a long list before you find what you want. It took me a while to locate a station in my home state of Oregon, for example, and another I like that's in Los Angeles. It took even longer to find New York-area stations, which, like all located east of the Mississippi, begin with a W, rather than a K, placing them further down the alphabetized list. Fortunately, it's easy to make a station a favorite by pressing and holding a key on the remote. Whenever you want to tune in, simply navigate to the favorites menu, where the scrolling will be quicker.

Drawbacks aside, it's hard to quibble with the sound quality, for which Tivoli is widely known. I switched a few times between a local FM broadcast and the same station's live Web stream. There was a difference: The FM broadcast tended to have a deeper base and was louder. But the Internet stream was crystal clear and didn't have that annoying "bump" sound, heard every minute or so on other Internet radios, that's associated with the speed of the network.

Connecting to Your Computer

Another bonus: The radio is also able to take music from an iPod through a stereo patch cable or from a USB drive. It can also connect directly to the music stored on your computer over the network. The included documentation tells how to do this on a Windows PC (MSFT), but not on a Mac. Even after finding instructions for sharing music files from a Mac, via Tivoli's Web site, I couldn't get it work.

One obvious missing feature: The radio should let you connect to music discovery services, such as Pandora or Last.fm (CBS), or such other services with streams as Rhapsody (RNWK). I hope that will be addressed in a software upgrade.

I listened to Internet streams on this radio for a full weekend—and enjoyed the experience. If you live far away from home and like to hear radio from your own home town or in your own language, the ability to dial it up over the Internet is a great thing. But you can do it just as easily, if not more easily, on a PC than on a dedicated radio. As much as I hate to admit it, there's only so much appeal for Internet-connected radios, especially when you consider that most people listen to the radio only their cars, or at home first thing in the morning for the traffic and weather. That makes the $599 to $749 price range excessive.

I like this product a great deal, mostly because it's made well, and Tivoli got right more than it got wrong. I hope Tivoli keeps working on Internet radios. Given another year, perhaps features could improve and prices could come down on another less-expensive model. But for now, it's hard to make a case that this product is worth so high a price.

Hesseldahl is a reporter for BusinessWeek.com.