Sangean WR-1 AM/FM Wooden Cabinet Radio, Walnut Review

I like the old school analog tuner, which is easy to use and pulls in stations really well. The audio quality would be great, except it has waaay to much bass. We have ours on the kitchen counter, and even at moderate volume, the junk on the counter resonates when somebody is just talking on the radio. A great radio should make it sound like people on the radio in the same room as you, not speaking over a PA system at the bottom of a well.

In fact, the bass was so objectionable, it was almost unlistenable. I took a piece of packing tape and put it over the resonance port in the back, which took enough of the edge of the bass to make it marginally acceptable. The only reason I kept this was that it's tuner is so good. I'd avoid this model, or any similar Sangean model unless it had a tone control.

Update: my wife found the bass so objectionable, she went out and bought a cheap clock radio to replace it. To see if the radio could be salvaged, I opened up the box. Aside from the compact transformer based power supply, the radio is contained on two circuit boards, one in front containing mostly radio stuff, one in back containing mostly power amp stuff and back connectors. Amplification duties are handled by a single, unmarked IC in a heatsinked, single inline package. This is possibly a TDA1010 or similar, which is mainly targeted at the car audio market.

There are two issues, I think, that cause the objectionable "boom" sound. The first is the speaker, which is a rather massive 3.5" unit similar to those used in car audio. Replacing this with a different unit might help, either a cheap unit with less bass capability, or a more expensive one with an aftermarket crossover.

The second issue is the cabinet, and some people might find this important for different reasons. The cabinet is not "wood" except by the most liberal definition of the word. It is a wood resin composite -- something like bakelite. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with this, but the material is extremely dense and the cabinet is definitely resonating. Theoretically covering the resonsance port would make this worse, but it seems move the boom to a less objectionable frequency. It might be possible to add weight to the case to shift the resonance lower.

In any case, this case is certainly not "walnut", it is wrapped in tough synthetic sheeting with walnut grain printed onto it. She sheet is actually overlapped on the bottom of the cabinet, and if you actually look at the "wood grain" you see it twists around the corners in ways that wouldn't happen on a real wood cabinet.

That said, the fact that this is not actually wood isn't necessarily a problem, it's a high quality plastic cabinet. In this case it seems poorly matched to the speaker, which is perhaps too much speaker for a cabinet this small. The more I think about this, the more I am convinced the best course of action would be to replace the speaker with a more appropriate one. It's not that the speaker is bad, far from it. It's just too much for this cabinet.

Second update: I soldered in a 220 microfarad non-polarized capacitor in series with the speaker. Given that the speaker is 4 ohms, this should result in a low pass filter with a loss of 3db at 180Hz, 9db at 90Hz, 15db at 45Hz etc. The objectionable "boom" is actually subsonic; you can feel it in other parts of the house. Although the radio is still bass heavy, the boom seems somewhat attenuated. I've ordered a 7.0 mh inductor from Parts Express using Amazon. Putting this in parallel with the speaker should net no noticeable reduction above 200Hz, 3db at around 130 Hz, and 12db/octave thereafter, yielding a 15db reduction at 64Hz, a more dramatic reduction of subsonic boom.

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