Pure Move DAB/FM radio review

Pure's new palm-sized DAB/FM portable radio, called Move, has been designed with outdoor use firmly in mind. It'll happily pop in your pocket, but it also has a rear-mounted, hinged stand when it needs to be standalone.

Perhaps the most notable feature, however, is the incredible battery life. Use the supplied Li-on-equipped ChargePAK and the Move will provide over 40 hours of portable DAB listening from a ten-hour charge. A power adapter is included, too.

Move covers both digital and analogue bands, with full DAB III reception and decoding up to 192kbps. It offers ten presets each for DAB and FM and has a useful number of additional features for its size (width 15cm height 8.5cm, depth 2.7cm) and price.

These include a 3.5mm auxillary input, headphone output and something called textSCAN, which allows users to pause and control DAB scrolling text – useful should you need to 'name that tune'. FM benefits from RDS and there's also a USB input for future updates via PC.

Build quality is excellent: the fascia boasts a brushed-aluminium finish which fronts a soft-touch rubber main chassis. A central toggle switch controls volume, station search/select and textSCAN and there is a further pair of two-function control buttons that delve into menu, presets, info and DAB or FM operation.

Move's key-press-activated, orange-backlit LCD display is small, but legible and can be left permanently on if required. It displays 16x2 characters, plus a number of function icons. As part of Pure's EcoPlus family, the company claims an impressive 0.95-watt power consumption for Move, which might make you feel better in your main hi-fi is 'always on'.

Sound quality

Hi-fi it ain't, but let's get some perspective here; as palm-sized, ultra-portable radios go, Move has a very appealing sound quality, if in the classic 'tranny' mould. It's 50mm drive unit gives a typically small-scale bandwidth that eschews the frequency extremes and instead favours the all-important speech band.

Legibility with the spoken word is, therefore, very good. With headphones attached – we used our real-world reference Sennheiser HD 650s (£400) – the sound comes alive and shows the strength of Pure's electronics expertise; lets not forget that with the Evoke-1, Pure started the whole DAB thing off.

Go back to the internal speaker, however, and the lack of bass is inevitable. Orbital's Halcyon (from the new hits album, 20) at 128kbps on DAB had plenty of midrange drive and high-frequency bite, but was notably bass-shy. That said, Move has to be put in context – it's a 280-gram radio after all.

A move to Radio 3 in FM (test location five miles from the Wrotham mast in Kent) and things step-up, as you might expect. The gulf between FM and DAB – even at 192kbps – becomes obvious, especially with the HD 650s. Following a tune with the Move is easy, but speech is where it performs best.

For the money, Move is certainly fair value, especially when considering the built-in proprietary ChargePAK. In fact we've yet to come across a better-equipped, better-built radio with these tiny dimensions. It might not be bargain territory, but the superb construction, great feature count and two-year warranty certainly makes it worthy of a Best Buy badge in our eyes.

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