Victrola Retro Wood Bluetooth Radio with Built-in Speakers, Elegant & Vintage Design, Rotary AM/FM Tuning Dial, Wireless Streaming, Espresso

Nice retro look, good craftsmanship.Tuner and reception are nothing to brag about but better than others this size & price range.Where it really shines it quality of sound.I don't know how they did it, but they've managed to use a little 3-inch 4ohm 5-watt speaker and reproduce a very authentic reasonable facsimile of a high quality 1940's tube radio.So far, the Bluetooth has been solid, no lost connection, stuttering or skipping.Using one of the several internet radio station providers one can listen to any type of talk or music station you'd care to listen to, with a wonderful subtle aged quality to it.Well worth the money.

This is a refreshingly good quality radio at a relatively low price.A lot of people equate 'heavy' with 'quality', to such an extent that manufacturers actually put weights in their products with the hope of giving you that impression of quality. This is a fairly light radio. If you buy one you might be thrown for a moment on the feel of it. I was. This radio feels old school. I was a little excited by the name 'Victrola' on the front.This radio comes with a small instruction booklet, as all devices these days do. You don't need it.The volume knob is also the power switch. Turn it all the way down to turn it off. Maximum volume is not blasting loud, but it is plenty loud.There's a tone knob. For adjusting the tone. I typically listen to classical music or jazz and the tonal quality of this speaker is quite nice for that music. You can hear a noticeable difference between turning it down towards 'bass' and up towards 'treble'. It doesn't have subwoofer level bass sound, but you can definitely hear lower frequencies. I played a little bit of older hard rock on it, and it sounds pretty good. Just don't expect the floor to vibrate. Turning it all the way up towards 'treble' doesn't doesn't give it too much of a tinny sound.There's a knob that switches between Bluetooth, FM and AM.Switching it away from Bluetooth disconnects it from your device. It needs to resynch when you switch back to Bluetooth. I have an iPhone and with some Bluetooth speakers I have issues with music playback stopping and not resuming when a timer or alarm goes off, or if I ask Siri for anything. This speaker actually resumes playback in those situations, which is nice.I live in a small town in the mountains. I can pick up exactly 2 stations from where I live. The reception for those 2 stations is fine. The antenna is a wire that comes directly out of the wooden box, it's not detachable. I haven't bothered with AM, I don't know of any AM stations here.There's something about the sound of most modern bluetooth speakers that I don't necessarily like that much, and I'm not sure what it is. Heavy audio compression? Whatever it is grates on my nerves. This product doesn't do that at all.I like this radio a lot.

Our first priority was to find a Bluetooth speaker with a knob for volume control. The primary user has difficulty finding and pressing the +/- (plus and minus) buttons found on most speakers. The fact that our search for knob speakers turned up in vintage styles was an unexpected bonus. Apparently, knobs are considered so old fashioned that that’s the only way you can find them. But that’s fine. It only adds style to function.Next, it had to be sized right for the spot where it must sit in order to be reached. Several cool styles were just too big. One was too tiny and toy-like. This model was described as a middle-of-the-road size and turned out to be just about right.The sound quality was our next concern. We wanted it to sound decent but we weren’t going to spring for Bose, so we kept our expectations in check. Narrowing down the choices left us in one-speaker territory, so we hoped for the best. Sound quality is very subjective, so to us, it sounds decent. It can be heard fine, the volume is good for the range of use, the adjustable bass/treble knob helps (but we just put it in the middle), and the tracks sound like the quality of file that’s coming out of the computer. Is this a party box? Of course not. But for our room-range, simply listening to music purposes, we’re happy with the sound.The color wasn’t so important, but it’s nice that there are color choices. We liked the oak color in the picture, but it was labeled walnut. Hmm? Could be a typo, so we went with that over the awful dark color or the expensive light color. Why items have different prices for different colors, we’ll never know. It’s the exact same thing! But we digress. When it came in, the oak color on the box was right, but the item itself is definitely a darker walnut color. Apparently, nobody makes anything in oak color anymore. It’s very hard to find. But the walnut is tolerable.The radio is immaterial to us. It’s cute to have a dial there for retro looks, but we have no intention of using it. This is only a Bluetooth speaker to us. Incidentally, the Bluetooth connected to the computer in a flash! We never even opened the manual. It’s self-explanatory to set the dial to BT mode, turn it on, and then go into the computer settings and Add A Device. Boom! Victrola showed up and Elvis was playing instantly!The power cord was an unexpected bonus. We may have assumed a rechargeable battery, but the description does say corded electric. Honestly, we read about so many speakers, we can’t remember what we thought its power source was. As it turns out, the power cord is great. The fact that it’s plugged in means that it can play forever, just like the old days when you didn’t have to think about charging every device before you can use it.