Insignia Portable HD Radio Player Available at Best Buy for Only $49.99

In addition to netbooks, I am a general gadget addict, and while generally I don't jump on things as an early adopter, this just looked too good to be true. Having never been thrilled with either the performance or physical design of HD receivers at RS and others available, the thought of having this capability in such a small package was something too good to resist.

After placing an order locally, I found the NS-HD01 at
ONE Best Buy. I have been trying it out this morning and have to say this is one little wonderful gadget.

The color screen gets high marks. Tuning is absolutely simple —you seek tune and then can use the UP/DWN buttons to scroll through the available HD subchannels. Reception sensitivity here in the DC area is superb — playing it through my home multi-speaker setup yields excellent sound, great volume.

I have experienced no fading or breakup of local HD channels. Just the minijack into my home system suffices perfectly for every HD channel in this geographic area.

Now — for my purposes, I would make this recommendation
to Best Buy/Insignia — put another fixed level audio output on the radio — this would enable recording of signals in addition to just being able to listen. And the next obvious step would be to incorporate a
solid state recording capability, with say a 2 GB minimum capacity.

If they are really smart they would design the next version of this along the lines of the CC Witness which enables use of both internal and SDHC card recording as well as a multi-event timer. In fact, CCrane could take a hint from this.

But that’s for the future — the Insignia just shows that you don’t really need to get a large HD receiver if you want to take advantage of the new technology. What a great addition to the HD market!