Grace DigitalMondo Elite Smart Internet Radio, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, 7-Day Alarm – Microphone-Free (Black)

As broadcast radio declines in both quality and quantity, I wanted to improve on my last-century clock radio. This is it! It's compatible with dozens of streaming services. Although there's no provision for receiving broadcast radio, I've found that most broadcast stations also stream their content. I can, if I want, hear the classical subchannel of the local public radio station. This model is also equipped for SiriusXM, so I can wake up to the same programs I hear in my car or listen to one of the extra streams from SiriusXM not available by satellite.The radio looks good and sounds good. It comes with something very rare in the 21st century: a printed manual of almost 50 pages! Setup is not quite as intuitive as I'd like, but the manual makes it easy.Something not mentioned in the description or the manual is that there's a Grace Digital app that will let you adjust settings, including things like alarms. That's a good thing. The radio is on a night table, so about waist height. Changing settings at the radio itself wold break your back! With the app, I can do that using my phone. (There are two apps; the one needed for this GDI-WHA8001 radio is "Grace Elite Remote." Neither app works with older Grace Digital radios.) There's an included remote control, but the app makes it unnecessary.Another reviewer was unhappy with the sound quality. C'mon, man... it's a table radio with one speaker. It's just fine for a clock radio or for casual listening. Someone else was unhappy that the screen was too bright for a dark bedroom at night. That may have been an older model. This one allows you to set brightness for daytime and has another setting for night. You can set the time that the radio switches between day and night. I've set mine to go into night mode at 8:00 PM and return to day mode at 6:00 AM, which is about dawn here. However, it looks like the backlight is always full-on and the brightness is controlled using the liquid crystal layer of the display. There's a fair amount of light leakage. Hey Grace Digital engineers! How about some pulse-width modulation on the backlight to set brightness, and some high-contrast color choices for us geezers?The radio has built-in soothing "sleep sounds" like waves, surf, or rain. The sleep sounds are in the Music Services menu section. The alarm mode will override those soothing sounds, so you can go to sleep with distant surf and wake to Phil Phlash in the morning.Once you set the time zone, the radio gets, and keeps, the correct time over the Internet using something called Network Time Protocol, or NTP. Time zones are represented as continent and city, so U. S. Eastern is "America/New York."Of course this radio won't play CDs, but you can rip your CDs to one of those mini "plug and stay" USB drives. The radio will play all files in a directory, although you must pick one file to start. So, you can organize your playlists into directories on the USB drive. Very cool! The USB socket in my radio is upside-down; it could be a manufacturing defect, or maybe they're all that way. You have to tilt the USB drive down about 20 degrees to insert it. It should really be right-side-up and exactly horizontal. :-(It's not perfect in a few other ways. One gripe is that you can't use the "built-in" Chromecast to SEND music from the radio to other devices. I almost went down to four stars because of that. It does have a headphone jack that could be connected to line-in on an amplifier... uh, if the amplifier were close by. The package includes a 3.5mm to RCA cable kit.You can send the output to a Bluetooth headphone or speaker. I've used the Anker Soundsync A3352 Bluetooth receiver that's on Amazon to send the output to my 20th century under-cabinet radio in the kitchen, with two difficulties. The radio speaker is silenced when a Bluetooth device is connected, so no multi-room. Grace Digital could fix that with a "Silence speaker when Bluetooth is connected" check box in settings that could be unchecked for multi-room playing. Also, the app won't control Bluetooth, so pairing a device in another room takes some running back and forth. GDI could fix that, too, by adding Bluetooth to the app. You might be able to get multi-room over Bluetooth with some Bluetooth mesh speakers. That's above my paygrade.My last gripe is that there are built-in alarm sounds for those who don't want radio in the morning. I've found no way to preview those sounds other than to set an alarm for "a minute from now" and See What Happens.I'd buy another if I needed one someplace else.

I can't yet speak to longevity, but as a music lover the Mondo Elite is the best thing I've purchased in a very long time. I had it out the box and connected to my WiFi and home stereo in minutes. I've already found several stations I love on iHeartRadio, which is built-in. So are Pandora, SiriusXM, Spotify, Amazon Music, and several others. Running out of inputs to my stereo, I then plugged my existing bluetooth receiver into the Aux input on the Mondo using the supplied cable, and that problem was solved, too. But THEN I figured out how to pair the Mondo directly with my bluetooth device (which took a little longer to figure out, including time studying the Mondo Elite user guide, which you CAN find and download before you buy) so now I don't need my old bluetooth receiver, and my Aux input is free again for something else. It looks like it would be an awesome alarm clock, too, so I may be buying another one.

Outstanding. I've been holding off buying this because it was expensive, but this was a Christmas present to myself. Where I live, the Boston Radio stations don't carry CBS AND ABC RADIO NEWS ON THE HOUR. So being able to pull in WBBM NEWSRADIO CHICAGO AND KOMO NEWSRADIO IN SEATTLE gave me those NEWS STATIONS. Also a local power grid absolutely kills my AM RADIO reception. Now I can pretty much program EVERY Radio station in the Boston and Worcester markets.Overall it's easy to set up. They give you 5 Presets on the physical buttons for your 5 absolute favorites, but you literally have 100 Favorite Stations for Internal Presets.Just be patient on finding your stations. For example, I wanted to make 98.5 The Sports Hub a Preset and it didn't work. But I did find it listed another way and it DID work.If you use radiolocator.com to see every station in your market, you can find every station you want. I wound up programming my distant stations first and then all my local stations in order by Radio frequency AM and FM.It also has Sirius XM! All you need is your Internet Access Sign in and Password from your Sirius XM ALL ACCESS SUBSCRIPTION and you're in.I easily connected this unit to my 36 Year Old Pioneer Home Stereo and the sound quality was amazing. There were a few reviews on this unit saying the sound quality was lousy. That is simply NOT TRUE. If you hook up this radio to a home stereo, it is beautiful. I have absolutely NO problem with this unit sound wise by itself.The Audacy Music Stations are all there including JACK FM KCBS FM in Los Angeles and KROQ too. And all Audacy CBS NEWS stations like WCBS in NY, KNX in Los Angeles and KCBS in San Francisco are there. You also have access to the many HD radio stations out there.FYI, many radio stations are no longer blacking out Sporting Events on their stations. I pulled in the Patriots game on 98.5 The Sports Hub last Sunday and psyched it to my DIRECT TV and it was beautiful.FYI everybody, INTERNET RADIO has about a 2 minute delay. If you can live with that, then this radio is awesome.With my DirectTV receiver DVR that pauses, I had no problem psyncing the TV to this radio..This Radio in every aspect is a winner and hits it out of the park.

I love this radoi! The sound quality is amazing, The screen is customizable to icons and brightness. You need to know two things and don't let the app discourage you! The radio is excellent!1). Spotify Connect Sleep Timer with Podcasts will absolutely NOT WORK with WiFi by design...BUT it works with Bluetooth!2). If you adjust the FONTS under Display Settings - the Bluetooth icon and options DISAPPEAR! Uncheck 'Small Fonts' and the other option to make Bluetooth devices and options reappear. (Who coded this?!!)3). With the app, Google is your friend!