PURE launch new in-car Highway 300Di DAB radio
Posted on Thursday, November 10th, 2011 at 11:11 pm. #
In the bowels of the London Transport Museum (transport? geddit?!?!?!?!) this evening, I saw the new PURE Highway 300Di.
The old PURE Highway was decent enough, but not really very pretty. Wires all over the place, and a large clunky device with a big sucker to stick it to the windscreen. It worked – albeit not too well, since it came with a rubbish interior antenna, and relied on people like you or I to install the thing.
The new PURE Highway is a really nice thing. The “D” stands for “Dual”, I’m guessing, since there are dual tuners in there: one to listen to DAB radio, the other to continuously scan to work out what’s available and what isn’t. The “i” stands for iPhone – yes, it’s got controls (and a charger) for your iPhone, iPad and iPod, and the official Apple stamp of approval. It also plays audio files straight from a USB key (and, incidentally, is also firmware upgradeable that way too).
The guts of the receiver are now hidden away, meaning that the only visible thing is the small control panel. It’s tiddly, nicely built, and simply unclips to remove it. It connects to your inbuilt car stereo by either the aux input or an FM rebroadcast. No more wires. The software is responsive and quick.
The antenna is now a proper decent external antenna, and an active (powered) one, too. My DAB radio in my car has a passive (unpowered) antenna, and does a great job of picking up DAB signals, so an active one should be even better.
And the radio now includes pause and rewind. This is, as the Marketing Director Colin Crawford says, a really useful feature in the car. Popping out of the car to fill up with petrol, and you can pause the programme you’re listening to, so you don’t miss a beat. Nice.
And should you drive into France or Germany, you’ll find this DAB receiver works too, since it’s WorldDMB profile-1 compliant (so it has DAB+ and DMB-R on it), and it even picks up L-band for those countries that use it.
The absence of wires means that this product now needs to be installed professionally, but PURE have worked out a deal with Halfords, who are offering free installation until the end of 2011. It’s exclusively in Halfords until March next year (the man from Halfords says 90% of the UK are within a 20 minute drive of a Halfords, as it happens, so no great shakes).
This is really in-car DAB coming of age. I’d never have considered the clunky older model; but the new model is fab. As my Blaupunkt DAB radio has now broken a bit (it gets confused as to whether it has a CD inside it or not, to the accompaniment of rattling noises and periods of blank audio), it’s nice to know I have a decent replacement should I need one.
This looks as though it’s been through lots of user testing and lots of real thought. It’s a lovely thing. For £179 it’s not too expensive, either, in comparison with other in-car audio things.
[I worked for PURE - on their internet radio products, not this - until June of this year.]
James, I know you are a die-hard Pure fan, but have you looked at replacing your Blaupunkt with a JVC DAB set given that you have a single DIN set-up at the moment?
JVC KD-DB52 (available Halfords and others) at around £155 would be a straight swap with your Blaupunkt and does DAB+, plays CDs, has an aux-in and does ipod/USB control too, although no pause and rewind or second tuner. For £185 you can buy the same model with Bluetooth hands-free capability. Can’t make out from the current specs, but certainly the old JVC DAB sets (like the one I own) were also capable of working with steering wheel controls too.
I note there are single DIN models out there from £120 which do DAB+/CD/USB/ipod/SD card/aux in (such as the Beat 490), you may be suprised what is out there (if you haven’t already looked aorund).
This radio looks like a good effort by Pure to address the shortcomings of the old model. I just worry that the price and fact it is only in Halfords will stop it from becoming perhaps as big a hit as it could otherwise be.