Logitech Squeezebox -vs- Grace Internet Radio

[Scott Greczkowski]

My wife got me a Grace Internet Radio for Christmas, as it was something I have been hinting I wanted for awhile now.

So Christmas day came and under the tree was a Grace Internet Radio for me. I was happy... until I tried listening to XM Radio... you see the Grace Internet Radio can play Sirius but it can't play XM. (Isn't Sirius/XM the same company now?)

Then I started going through the radio stations it could pick up and the database and the database (which was coming from the internet) was really out of date. And when I mean really out of date I mean at least 3 years old. (It still listed WCBS out of New York City as Jack FM when it hasn't been Jack for years... and they are lots of stations which are listed wrong.)

Anyways went to the grace support forum and there haven't been posts there for months. this concerned me. Did I get a deadend product?

Then as I was looking at the paper I saw the Best Buy flyer and saw the Logitech Squeezebox Radio. I did some research online and it could do all I wanted and MORE. It could do things that the Grace couldn't, such as play Slacker Radio, Radio IO, XM Radio (and SIRIUS too!) and also Shoutcast as well!

The Squeezebox was on sale, for almost the price my wife payed for the Grace Internet Radio. And to make things more exciting I won a $400 Best Buy gift certificate at my office Christmas Party, so if she returned the Grace radio back to Sears we got $140 back and basically got the Logitech radio for FREE.

So got the Logitech tonight and WOW what a world of difference between the two!

The Logitech has a full color display and they use it. I first tried tuning into a radio station owned by Clear Channel and not only did I get the audio but also a picture of the host of the show I tuned into.

I then tuned into some music stations and again saw a photo of the group who was singing the song. And the audio quality was WORLDS ahead of the Grace Radio. This thing puts out BIG SOUND for a little box!

In order to get XM to work I had to install a "squeezebox server" on my computer, once I had this I could add the XM Plugin which is a third party add on. Adding it in was simple and in a few moments I was listening to XM!

I started playing around with the Squeezebox server and was amazed at what I could do with it. I could click things on my laptop and they would happen instantly on the radio, including change stations, listen to my music collection, listen to my custom Pandora and Slacker stations and even control the volume.

I then downloaded a free app onto my Android phone which gave me full remote control of the Squeezebox, this is is AWESOME!

If your searching for a internet radio take a look at the Logitech Squeezebox, you are going to be VERY happy with it!

This thing is WORLDS ahead of the Grace Internet Radio.

 

[Carroll A]

Hey Scott my wife got me the Grace Allegro radio... So far the jury is still out for me if I like it or not. You are correct the Reciva database is way out of date. I am haoppy that atleast I can listen to some of my favorite radio stations from back home where I lived without being tied to the computer, but for some reason there seems to be issues with their gateway that allows the station list to update. You can send updates to Reciva, but from a lot of the post or lack of over at the forums they seem to not really bother with updating things. My wife got it for me so I am haoppy that she got it, but now that I have heard other people talk about the squeezebox I wished she would have got that for me instead... CC

 

[bender3000]

I have Logitech for 4 years now, it is the best streaming music option.

 

[Scott Greczkowski]

Squeezebox just got a new software update yesterday.

I have been playing around for the last half hour with some new plugins. This is SO much better then the Grace.

 

[Foxbat]

Scott, a friend of mine out in California sent me his old SqueezeBox when he upgraded to the new model. This was maybe six years ago, before Logitech bought SqueezeBox. I used it at work as a way to play the music WE wanted to hear (also, radio reception in our office was bad then and non-existant now). The playback unit has a 2-line florescent display, remote control, and a really good digital-to-audio convertor, but that's about it. The SqueezeServer that ran on the Windows 2000 PC did most of the work. I imagine the new playback system has more autonomy, too, and can work independent of the server piece.

The only reason I stopped using it was Apple. I had all my music in iTunes, but I didn't start ripping my collection to MP3 until after I got my RAZR three years ago. Even though the SqueezeServer can work with your iTunes collection, you need to run some third-party app (LAME, if I recall) to play back Apple-encoded music. It wouldn't play back songs downloaded from Apple, which is why I let the SqueezeBox lie unused now. I use AirPlay all the time now.