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The Fox Report Barry Fox’s technology column Pure audio I t is a perennial problem: one half of a couple is serious about audio and has a top end hi-fi system with complicated controls; the other half just wants to listen in the kitchen, bedroom or home office at the press of a couple of buttons. There are countless kitchen DAB and FM radios, some also working as Internet radios, but very few of them play CDs. Those that do it all for around £100 sound awful and fall apart after a short period of use. So there is a real need for something simple and affordable, which is solidly made and does not offend the ears. I found one that looked hopeful from Pure, the British company originally owned by chip designer Imagination Technologies that kickstarted consumer DAB. But after around ten years at the top, Pure went downhill with OLED displays that stopped displaying and Internet radio portals that stopped porting radio. Pure was then bought by Austrian company AVenture AT and, after initial marketing confusions, has been trying to rebuild its reputation. So would Pure’s Classic C-D6i do-it-all box turn back the clock to the good old days, or turn out to be more junk from China? I am pleased to report that the “designed in the UK” C-D6i really does do it all, and does it pretty well for an affordable price not too far over £200. The basic features include DAB+ and FM radio, CD playback, Bluetooth, USB connectivity, Internet radio and podcast listening. The electric basics are a stereo pair of built-in 2 × 3 inch (50 × 75mm) full-range speakers, rated at 15 watts each. What matters more than the specifications is that the speakers deliver enough clean mid-fi sound for a small room. Put a hand over the speaker bass ports at the rear of the box and you get the satisfying feel of pumping air. What the company describes as “an intuitive, user-friendly interface” could also be described as 74 “other half” friendly. The user is led through initial setup by a menu that makes entering a WiFi SSID and password without a keyboard as easy as it is possible to be. The displays shows a side-­scrolling alphabet which, unusually, has its upper-case and lower-case character options side by side; AaBbCc and so on. Usually, the user has to keep jumping between separate lists of all upper-case and all lower-case options. The display is clear bright colour. It’s only when you have tried to set up and use a radio with a failing OLED display or weedy LCD backlight that you realise just how important it is for any system to have a decent display. Let’s hope these display components last longer than those previously used by Pure. Searching through the world’s gazillion Internet radio stations is always a pain, but Pure eases the pain with an iterative system that lets the user enter short word search strings for “Starts With”, “Ends With” and “Contains”. Bluetooth 5.3 allows streaming from a smartphone; a USB socket plays music already ripped from other sources, which is the modern equivalent of making a cassette mix tape. Inconveniently, the USB socket is on the rear. So I added a short USB male-to-female fly lead to make front access easier. There’s no option to feed audio out to anything else. This makes sense because no-one is buying £200 all-in-one boxes to connect them to a serious hi-fi system. But there is an Aux mini-jack stereo socket input for an external analog line level signal. I tried connecting an old tape deck, and it should also work with a vinyl turntable with built-in pre-amp; or a TV’s audio output; or the headphone output of pretty much anything else. Timers wake you with your favourite morning station and switch the box off for sleep. As expected, there is an option to create a list of favourite radio stations. Not-so-expected, the list can be a seamless mix of DAB, FM and Internet radio. A nice touch is that the remote control has six buttons that can be long-press programmed to store six stations of any type. So pressing button 1 calls up an Internet station from California, button 2 switches to BBC Radio 2 on DAB, button 3 gets BBC Radio 3 by FM and so on. Having both DAB and FM reception makes good sense. In one semirural location, auto-scan found 97 DAB stations and only 3 FM stations; in other locations, the results could be just the opposite, with next to no DAB reception but plenty of FM choices. The Classic C-D6i has an option to listen to podcasts, which involves searching through the jungle of ’casts that are now available, using the same scrolling list used to enter a WiFi password for filtering ’casts by Language, Country of Origin, Category and keywords. Subscribing to a podcast makes it a Favourite, and there are options to Listen Again and look back at your History of searches. In practice, I often could not find ’casts that I knew (from using a computer, tablet or phone) to be available. Those that I did find were more by luck rather than judgement. I reckon it’s easier all-round to use a mobile phone or tablet with Apps to search for podcasts and then connect the mobile by Bluetooth to play through the Pure speakers. The C-D6i comes with a bare 15V DC/2.67A power supply with a twistfit socket for a choice of separate two-pin European or three-pin UK plugs. This creates an unecessary opportunity for impatient consumers to get things wrong. I’ve suggested to Pure that they make things easier for everyone by pre-assembling the PSUs to suit the country where the box is sold. I didn’t hear back, so don’t hold out much hope that Pure will do something so simple. [Companies love it when they can create one ‘worldwide’ SKU rather than having to keep track of several different versions, and one can understand why that would be easier to deal PE with – Editor] Practical Electronics | February | 2026