Grace Digital Mondo 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. [...]