Tag Archives: revo

100% Generation Discofunk

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Once a week I spend a whole day working from home, doing academic bits and bobs. This can be exceedingly tedious if you don’t have something that keeps you going. Being the old person that I am and having a rather peculiar taste in music, the Revo is playing 100% Generation DiscoFunk all day. Well, the station is French, so they rather pronounce it ‘foenk’, but you get the gist.

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Note the kitchen stains. Tss Tss...

Even the driest meta-analyses can be fun if you have a bit of S.O.S. band in the background. And with the Revo it’s not a problem getting the station everywhere in the house (Internet Radio in the bathtub. The ultimate luxury).

Ipod touch +Last.Fm + Revo iBlik Radiostation = Excellent Entertainment

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So, you have a Last.fm account, but you don’t want a computer in the living room. Well, if I say “want”, I mean ‘Not allowed’. No, not even a small one (women can detect even the smallest aberration in their interior design). But you were allowed to buy that nice Revo iBlik Radiostation, because it looks so stylish and it fits rather fetchingly into the modular book case. And you have of course a nice high speed wireless connection. It would of course be a wonderful idea if the iBlik would offer a Last.Fm plugin, but it seems that the Scottish electrosmiths at Revo are more interested in design then advancing their software (has any iBlik or Pico owner ever had a software update??), so the Last.fm connectivity has to come from somewhere else. Enter the iPod touch that you still had lying around somewhere, and tadaa: one click and you have one lovely sounding (I have a set of smashing active monitors hooked up to it) and acceptable looking Last.Fm living room entity. I always knew that the IPod touch had more to offer than just watching ‘Lost’ on the train.

The Revo iBlik Radiostation

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I hope you all had some good pagan holidays.

This year the best girlfriend and I decided to hold a credit crunch Christmas (ccc) and limit the presents to the appropriate sums for a general recession. Nevertheless there was something on my mind for some time: I always wanted a small, ‘all in one’ solution for the bedside: It needed to be small, be able to dock my Ipod, play music from my media server via uPnP, stream from the internet, play DAB stations and FM. Tall order.

Or so I thought.

Enter one the most ridiculously named products ever, the Revo iBlik Radiostation.  Revo are a Scotland (Lanark, to be exact) based company specialised in DAB/Multisource devices, and the afore mentioned device does it all. So, I can listen at night not only to Radio4, but also to my podcasts on the Ipod, and, even more amazing, my beloved Radio New Zealand National via wi-fi or ethernet.

It all does it from a stylish little box with an antenna, an ethernet connector, a headphone adapter and, crucially, a stereo cinch connector that can hook up to an amp and a set of proper speakers, making this a very delectable choice for the living room as well.

So, does it work?

Yes. All of it, every bloody feeature. No bugs yet, and I have to admit that I am mightily impressed.At 180 pounds (that’s really favourable in Euro, btw) it doesn’t come cheap, but it does everything it should do, with so much more flaire and style than the other multisource options out there, like the ridiculously expensive and ugly as hell Phillips Streamium. Honestly, good hardware does not have to look like something out of ‘Star Trek: The next Generation’ and does not have to be as expensive as a dilithium chrystal either.