Want to wake up in style, with your favorite music? Check out the Sony ICF-CD837. The LED clock display makes it easy to read the time with those bleary, morning eyes. Plus, variable brightness control allows you to turn the display down at night, while dual alarm settings let you set separate wake-up times. Enhanced wake modes mean you can wake to a buzzer alarm, birdsong, a rushing river, the AM/FM radio, or your favorite CD track. And the audio department on the ICF-CD837 is no slouch, with two stereo speakers plus a subwoofer unit-- all built into a single, sleek unit. Five station presets make it easy to find your favorite radio stations fast, or just pop in a CD when you want to catch some tunes throughout the day. There's even a headphone jack for private listening.
1 Expectations met.
This has decent sound for a clock radio and the display is large and bright. It has a simple appearance which I like. There are no birdsongs or gushing water sounds.
2 not bad, but Amazon's Item Description is BS
...there is no digital tuner so no 5 station presets; no "birdsong, gushing river" or any other nature sounds; no headphone jack; and sure as heck no freakin' subwoofer (not that any subwoofer small enough to fit in a clock radio wouldn't sound like crap)! WAKE UP, Amazon, and check your facts!!!
However other than that, this is the best fifty dollar CD clock radio on the market (which says a lot about how sad the CD clock radio market is, at that). For one thing, it actually has a fairly attractive (or at the very least, inoffensive) form factor, compared to the gaudy-colored cutesy round models Sony and other makers have come out with in the past---are these industrial designers smoking crack or what?
Also I was impressed at how easy all the controls were to use---didn't even have to look at the instructions, it was that intuitive and also very ergonomic. This is about the main thing that Sony still does better than anyone else, provide ease of use. The green LED display is just the right size and brightness, and a big improvement over the horrible backlit LCD displays that many other clock radios have. There is an external FM antenna that helps somewhat---better would've been a detachable external antenna so you could hook up a better one to it. The adjustable "nap" timer is a very handy feature, as was the wake-to-CD alarms (2 of them) allowing you to choose which track you want to wake up to on the CD. I just use George Winston's "Winter" CD, it's nice and soothing. Even the buzzer on this thing is fairly pleasant.
I bought this mainly because I was tired of being jolted every morning by my Phillips clock radio's air-raid siren of a buzzer, and also because my city (Houston) has the absolute crappiest FM stations you could imagine.
What I really wish though is that Sony, Panasonic and other audio makers would just start putting alarm clocks in their minisystems so you could wake up to some half-decent sound quality music. This Sony is still way better than the Timex (hopeless!), Emerson, and other cheap generic garbage that Walmart sells but what can you really expect from tiny 1 watt per channel speakers?
Keep your expectations low though and this clock radio won't be too bad. I still could never bring myself to fork over three hundred bucks for the Cambridge cd clock radio.
What I really wish this clock radio had: 1. a 9V battery backup like my Phillips had, 2. having the CD, radio, or buzzer gradually increase in volume early in the morning, 3. MP3 capability (the box says it can play CD-Rs but don't know which format exactly), and ESPECIALLY 5. a headphone jack so that I could hook up this thing to some cheap self-powered computer speakers which would be a HUGE sound quality improvement.
3 Don't believe the ads for this item
The description of this product claims it will wake you up with a buzzer, radio, CD, or "the sounds of birdsong or a rushing river". It also claims to have 5 station presets, which implied to me that it must have a digital tuner. Neither claim is true. The fancy wakeup sounds don't exist and the tuner is the inferior analog style with a big dial and pointer that really can't pull in a clean FM station. Needless to say, there are no preset buttons.
On a positive note, it's a pretty good sounding small CD player and the clock has nice big numbers. But I was hoping to have a nice radio also -(
