Introduction

Radio lovers have a wide choice of products these days, from simple, battery operated radios to more expensive digital models or even a combined radio, CD and tape player. This has made buying a radio far less straightforward than before.

We've tested the most common options to help you make your choice. When deciding between models, you will want to consider how portable it has to be, what you want it to do, its sound quality and how much you want to pay for it.

Our tests

We compared two analogue radios, three digital radios and a combined radio, CD and tape player. We tested how well they pick up radio stations, how good they sound and if they are easy to use and tune. During this research we found many of the radios sounded quite different depending on whether we were listening to speech or music. Because of this, we have rated the radios for their sound quality when playing speech (Radio 4) or music (Capital FM, Radio 3, Classic FM). We also tested the maximum useable volume (the maximum volume before distortion) from the speakers and the loudness through the headphone socket.