Griffin Technology Radio Shark Radio Input

The Griffin Technology RadioSHARK is a $70 usb connected AM/FM radio receiver that turns your $1000 Windows or Mac PC into a $20 tabletop radio. Fortunately, the RadioSHARK adds a few redeeming features, being able to time shift your radio listening (pause or skip forward during listening), accept programmed scheduled recording, and encode recordings for playback on portable audio players. The RadioSHARK isn't "TIVO" for radio, primarily because there aren't electronic program guides (EPG) for this device radio like there are for PC tv tuners, but if you like to listen to radio, the RadioSHARK puts you in position to listen to your favorite programming at your leisure. Most users will wish that Griffin had put more effort into designing a robust tuner, though, as the RadioSHARK is mediocre, at best, when it comes to providing clear, noise free AM reception.

Setup/Installation and Initial impressions

In the box, you'll find the RadioSHARK receiver, a USB extension cable, Mac/PC software cd, and 35 page cd case size user manual. The receiver is a 7.5" tall, 4" deep device with 2" wide stand that is shaped like, not surprisingly, ...... a shark fin. A 4 foot USB cable is attached to the back of the fin, next to a combination headphone jack/antenna connector.

The RadioSHARK looks great, clearly made to be sold in the Mac section of your computer or electronics store, featuring a shell of high gloss white plastic and chrome base. Once each side of the fin are 3 parallel translucent curved windows, simulating radio waves. These windows are backlit, blue when the RadioShark is receiving power from the USB cable, and red when recording. If the RadioSHARK worked as well as it looked like it should work, I'd be in radio heaven.

I've installed the software both on a Dell 4550 desktop PC running Windows XP and a Mac ibook running OSX 10.3. Mac version 1.0 and Windows version 1.0.52.0 were included on the CD. I downloaded later versions of both (1.0.3 and 1.1.6 respectively) from the Griffin website. Using the latest version is strongly recommended, I found the Mac version 1.0 to be very buggy. No registration number or cd key was required during the installation. I live in a city with a population of about 100,000, and a metro area 2 or 3 times that, with plenty of nearby radio stations.

After installing the software, I plugged in the RadioSHARK into a USB port on each system, and was able to launch the software and start listening to radio stations. The Mac and PC RadioShark software and feature sets appear to be similar, though the mac version has a few slight advantages in features. One minor difference for example, while both allow you configure the software skin color, the Mac version appears to allow an infininite number of selections from a color wheel, while the PC version allows only 6 choices.

Radio Listening

Once launched, the RadioSHARK software tuner runs in your PC's System Tray as well as opening a tuner window on your PC. (The software must be running in the system tray or the Mac dock for scheduled recordings to work). I've found the RadioSHARK to be a mediocre tuner, no better than a $10 table top radio. If you intend to purchase and install the RadioSHARK near your computer, test the reception with an inexpensive radio first. If you hear pickup any background interference or hum when listening to a AM radio in the area near your PC, you can expect it to be worse with the Griffin RadioSHARK. Similarly, if FM reception is poor, expect it to be slightly worse with the RadioSHARK. The most significant faults I find with the RadioSHARK is the significant background hum that's carried with the AM radio playback and the poor AM reception, in general. (I've not determined the source of AM radio noise in my home, its the same kind of noise you'd expect to pick up from fluorescent lighting or other electrical devices. Most battery powered radios work adequately in my home, without hum, if I'm careful to orient the radio "just right", but its always a struggle, and unfortunately, its more of a struggle with the RadioSHARK)

The RadioSHARK gives you a few tools to work around the poor reception and less than optimal listening experience. The RadioSHARK comes with a extra 4 foot USB extension cable, allowing you more length and hence more options to locate the receiver optimally. This cable can also be kept coiled, which seems to help reception a little. Any cable or headphones plugged into the RadioSHARK's headphone jack also also acts as an antenna. The RadioShark software also offers a 10 band equalizer. When I'm listening to news, sports, and tallk shows on AM radio with the RadioSHARK, I can eliminate a lot of the background hum associated with AM radio listening by minimizing the mid range frequencies. This reduces the quality of the audio stream a significant amount, but I don't really have a better option for some stations I like to listen to.

The RadioSHARK is better at FM than AM. I can get all the FM channels we get with other radios in our home, with more or less the same sound quality. Occasionally I'll need to adjust the USB cable, which also serves as an antenna, to get static free reception. Sound quality is good, but not great. Music is clear, but the frequency response seems slightly "limited" to me. When I use the same headphones to listen to FM radio on my Zen micro mp3 player, and the RadioSHARK, either through my PC or the headphone jack on the RadioSHARK itself, I find the music is a bit flat or dull, though I can address most of that deficiency with the equalizer. Occasionally you'll hear skips or pops in the audio, particularly in time shift mode, though that's fairly rare.

The controls are intuitive. Frequency is adjusted by dragging a slider across a virtual radio dial. You mouse wheel can also adjust the frequency, though it seems backwards to me. Rolling the wheel forward lowers the frequency, rolling the wheel back switches to higher frequency. Separation seems to be good, I detect no bleed over from one frequency to the next.

In addition, the user interface has small buttions for AM/FM (band choice), SEEK, RECORD, SCHEDULER, EQUALIZER, and TIME SHIFTING.

Time shifting drops down a set of controls to pause, fast forward, and rewind radio playback. This button does not switch the RadioSHARK into and out of time shift mode, that's done with a right click (on PC's), or from the Menu (Mac's) via the Preferences. There's also a slider to move back in the time shift buffer. The buffer size is also set in the preferences menu.

Seek takes you to the next available station. Seek sensitivity is adjustable, though I don't see much differences in the settings. Seek works pretty well when you want to step through FM stations, but it rarely works, at least for me, when I want to go to the next AM station.

The equalizer is a 10 band version, with sliders, and you can name and save settings for different types of listening, a useful feature, given the differences in AM and FM playback.

The Record button starts recording whatever you are listening to real time. (Time shifted recording is not saved )

Recording

Time shifting and scheduled recording works pretty well on PC.s. The latest Mac version (as well as earlier versions from what I've read) has one fatal flaw, the software locks up on my ibook when the display goes into sleep mode, and starts stuttering. If you are just listening on a Mac, with recording turned off, the RadioSHARK keeps playing smoothly when the display darkens. This isn't a big problem for me, I'll keep the RadioSHARK on my PC, but Mac users should have concern if they are planning on using this on a laptop.

The interface to set scheduled recordings is intuitive enough. On PC's the date is selected on a calendar. Time, length, recording format, directory, duration, and station (choose from your presets) are all set from drop down menus that also offer a "6type in" option. That is, drop down for duration options vary in 15 minute and 1 hour increments, but you can set a duration of 1 hour and 17 minutes by typing that in. On Mac'3s the interface is similar, but times and dates are typed in. Recordings are saved as wav files (uncompressed) or as wma files (windows media audio). Compressed WMA files can have any bit rate (cbr), various sampling rates to 44khz, and be mono or stereo. On Mac's, files are saved as aiff or aac files, with a similar selection of recording settings and quality.

On my PC, scheduled recordings have worked as expected. The WMA and WAV files can both be transferred to my mp3 player and work well.

Conclusion

The RadioSHARK was a device that I really wanted to like and brag about. I love listening to all type of AM radio, morning drive shows, baseball, sports and news talk shows, and more. And the out of the box experience here is great. The RadioSHARK looks great and is easy to install. The FM part works pretty well. But FM radios for PC's are common, many TV tuner cards even include FM receivers. I was after the AM feature, and find the AM capabilities to be mediocre. AM radios for PC's are rare, and given the popularity of talk shows and broadcasts sports, I think there would be a real market for a device that could record high quality AM radio, for later playback on portable mp3 players. The RadioSHARK can do that, but the quality is lacking, primarily the background hum that I and other reviewers have noted is a significant problem. The RadioSHARK works well enough that I'll continue to use it, though I will also be looking for something better. Griffin continues to issue software updates, so I have some hope the product will continue to improve. If you're looking for an easy way to record FM broadcasts, the RadioSHARK might fit your needs, and is worthy of consideration.

Software versions:
1.0.3 (Mac) and 1.1.6 (PC)

Mfr's website
http://www.griffintechnology.com/products/radioshark/