Bounding into life with the typically friendly name "XDR-S3HD," Sony's first "HD Radio" goes for an old-school look, with a rich cherry wood (presumably wood: it could be plood) enclosure and fat, charcoal speaker covers.
The screen is a simple, expressive-looking LCD panel, but the device is topped with two knobs. The XDR-S3HD also offers a remote control, sleep timer, alarm, and an AUX socket to hook up an MP3 player. Or, maybe, a preamplified turntable.
At $200, it isn't wildly expensive, but the phrase "HD Radio" is naughty: it stands for "Hybrid Digital" and is a backronym crafted to make it appear the XDR-S3HD offers superior-definition audio to the current standards — in practice, digital radio is just fine, but suffers from compression artifacts. And there hasn't been any decent music for years, either. But that's not the XDR-S3HD's fault.
Online Store [SonyStyle.com]
.png){kind=logo}
