An audio station with plenty of punch

In fact, AXiS has such good sound quality that it was awarded “radio product of year” for 2011 by What Hi-Fi magazine.

I found AXiS delivered more punch than the Revo Heritage, reviewed earlier on this page. It reproduces good base and provides lots of detail. It’s powered by an 8 watts class D amplifier.

Although it is a mono radio product, its music is really enjoyable, especially if you like to listen to special music that’s almost impossible to find on general FM stations. And the Internet radio player comes with a stereo jack so you can enjoy your music in stereo as well.

Unlike Heritage, AXiS comes with a 3.5-inch colour TFT touch-screen that really makes it really easy to navigate through its six functions.

The colour screen is also used to display the album cover when you use the AXiS as the music streamer.

Apart from the Internet radio and music streamer functions, you can also use AXiS as a docking sound system for an iPod or iPhone. It also functions as an analogue FM tuner as well as a digital FM tuner, called DAB (digital audio broadcast), which may be available in Thai in a few years. You can connect a portable MP3 player to the AXiS using its auxiliary-in function and use it as an alarm clock too.

The AXiS also provides access to premium online music service Last.fm with a trial account of 31 days.

I tested the AXiS at home and had no problems setting up its wireless connection to my Wi-Fi home router.

Its eight functions can be accessed on the home screen. When a function is used, you return to the home screen just by tapping on the home icon at the bottom left corner of each screen.

AXiS provides a remote control though I found it just as quick to use the touch screen to control various functions and features.

If you want to use it as sound system for your iPod and iPhone, it does support most models of iPod and iPhone, including iPhone 4S, iPhone 3GS, iPod nano, iPod mini, iPod touch, iPod classic and iPod 4th generation.

The Internet radio is the star function of AXiS. During the test of AXiS on my 7 Mbit ADSL connection with True Online, I enjoyed hours of Internet radio listening and rarely lost the signal.

AXiS can give you access to over 16,000 Internet radio stations from 150 countries.

You can browse through the stations by countries or by genres. There are more than 50 genres to select, including Oldies, Pop, Reggae, Rock, Jazz, Classical and Latin Hits.

During the test, I listened to music from the 1970s and to classic rock, both of which are rarely available on normal FM stations. I also tuned in radio stations from the provinces, like Phuket Radio.

The “i” icon on the touch screen displays information about the station, such as the bandwidth of the streaming song. The screen also displays the station name, song title and album title being streamed.

You can also easily search the stations by typing part of their names with the easy-to-use onscreen keyboard. You can also store your favourites for easier access later.

The music streaming function of AXiS is very useful if you have a huge collection of digital music stored on your computer.

With just a few steps, you can set your Windows 7 to provide streaming access to AXiS so you can enjoy listening to music from any room.

And I love the colour display of AXiS, which shows the coloured album cover of the song being streamed along with the album and track title.

Best of all, AXiS can also easily access your collection of music stored on a NAS (network attached storage) hard drive.

I tested the AXiS with Synology NAS DiskStation DS110j. After the DS110j was connected to my home router, AXiS could find it without problem when I activated the music streaming function.

That allowed me to browse for music files stored on the hard disk inside the DS110j on the AxiS, both by albums or artists and, as a added bonus, by folders. Music streaming from the DS110j was smooth even though I tried 320 Kbps high-quality music files.

Using DS110j with AXiS is very good application. You can rip and back up your huge collection of music CDs into MP3 files stored on the DS110j and can stream with AXiS.

Revo AXiS is available from Siammetry, which is the online stockist/reseller of UK-based Revo, for Bt11,000. You can order it online at www.Siammetry.com or through Siammetry’s Facebook page.

 

         Key specs

_ Display: 3.5-inch colour TFT touch-screen

_ Power: 8 Watt class D amplifier 

_ Docking compatibility: 23 models of iPod and iPhones

_ Alarm: Digital alarm clock with Sleep and Snooze 

_ Connectors: 3.5mm headphone connector; Stereo RCA and Aux-In connectors; iPod/iPhone video out (composite) 

 

 

 

 

Tuning into the top 

You can tune into 16,000 Internet radio stations from 150 countries. Here are some interesting ones in different categories:

 

Top radio station: 

BBC Radio 2 (14.3 million UK listeners tune in each week – not counting millions of international listeners) 

 

Top Talk radio stations

1) BBC Radio 4: A speech station for curious minds (reaches 10.8 UK listeners each week)

2) Mysterious Universe: Mysterious Universe covers the strange, extraordinary, weird, and wonderful and everything in between. 

 

Top Jazz stations:

WBGO Jazz 88 FM Newark New Jersey ABC Jazz Sydney Australia

 

Top Classical stations:

WQXR: The Classical Music Station of NYC

       

Top Children’s radio station:

Fun Kids (A UK station for children under 10 and their families)

 

Top Classic Rock station:

1.FM Classic Rock Replay

Top Oldies station: 

Antenne Bayern Oldies but Goldies

 

Top Gay/Lesbian station: 

Joy 94.9, Melbourne, Australia

 

Top Bollywood station: 

PolskaStacja Bollywood from Poland