Since two days I really miss my favourite radiostation, it’s now officially out of the ether. Immediately I looked into alternatives. One alternative is to connect the stereoinstallation via coax to the cable, where Arrow Jazz still broadcasts. Unfortunately the installation doesn’t have a coax input. Then my gadget-instinct showed up and I searched for streaming audioplayers on the internet. This means you can listen to thousands of internet radiostations and the most important thing, I can also listen to Arrow Jazz again. After some research I decided to buy the Logitech Squeezebox Classic (actually manufactured by SlimDevices) at RAF (Utrecht).

This device is elegant, small, low power (only several watts) and very functional. It contains a vacuum fluorescent display with a 320×20 resolution which can display the songname, RSS-feeds or a VU-meter for example. Furthermore it contains a Wifi-receiver for the internet audiostreams and several audio outputs (analog RCA, digital optical, digital coax and headphone mini jack). The nice thing about the device for me is that there is a big open source community behind it (Wiki, forums). The company (SlimDevices) is really open about the design and what components are in it. Furthermore you can also get plugins for custom visualizations.

Finally you can also control the device (volume, change radiostation, add RSS-feeds) via internet or via the remote that comes with it. Anyway, I/we am/are very happy with it. The old radio is now stored somewhere upstairs.