Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Original review (10/10/2014) I found the Eton Mini generally to be an extremely well conceived, designed, and executed little radio, and I would have given it 5 stars had it not been for one fatal (at least to my ears) flaw (described under D, below). I have had the radio now for one week and it continues to perform well, with the same quality, solid feel (buttons and all) as when I received it. A. Construction: The radio appears to be very well made, with solid construction; size and weight appear perfect for the shirt pocket and carry-around use; all buttons and controls work well with a good feel to them. B. Design: Esthetically attractive; very good ergonomics. C. Performance: Good sensitivity and selectivity on AM (MW and shortwave) and FM. I found one odd problem on MW, and possibly on SW although I've not been able to reproduce the problem very consistently there: when first tuning a week station, the signal starts very week then grows stronger very gradually (in about 15 seconds). I think this may have to do with the AGC circuit not working properly or some related problem. I have not noticed this on strong signals. D. Sound quality: This is where I found the radio to fail badly, at least to my ears. I must point out that other reviewers have liked the sound quality. I found the sound to be extremely "hissy" and shrilly, especially on AM (on FM it is somewhat less so, but I still find it objectionable). I find it quite tiring and irritating to listen to it for an extended period. The high audio frequencies appear to be very much accentuated resulting in unnaturally prominent sibilants and the impression of increased static noise. If my guess is right, merely tempering the high frequency audio response could result in a radio that is much more pleasant to listen to. The sound through the ear buds is somewhat better (but not sufficiently so), and would, in my view, still benefit from some kind of low-pass audio filtering. E. Features: A very well thought-out set of handy and clever features which, except for the Alarm function, are not documented in the "Owner's Manual" that accompanied my unit. I'll describe below the features that I've stumbled upon: 1. Alarm (documented in "Owner's Manual"). 2. Sleep timer: press the power button twice to set it to 60 minutes (a sleep timer icon is displayed); press it more times to select shorter times. 3. LED clock display brightness: with the radio turned off, press HOUR button repeatedly to cycle through the brightness levels of the display (normal, off, low). 4. With the radio on, LED displays the frequency tuned, then after 30 seconds it reverts to displaying time (with the brightness that has been set in 3 above); pressing the power button again or changing the frequency will again display the frequency. 5. Scan: HOUR button scans up in frequency, MIN scans down. In shortwave, the radio conveniently skips over frequencies outside the standard shortwave bands (although those can still be tuned in manually). 6. With the radio on, pressing the TIME button tunes up in larger steps as follows: - In FM, it tunes up by 1 MHz. - In MW, it tunes up by 100 kHz increments. - In SW1 and SW2, it skips to the low frequency end of the next shortwave meter band (very handy). 7. Lock button disables both on/off power and tuning. 8. To set the MW tuning step to correspond to that used in your geographic region: With the radio off, press and hold the MIN button to toggle between 9 kHz and 10 kHz tuning steps. F. Batteries: The radio works very well with rechargeable NiMH AAA cells as well as alkaline cells, and battery life appears good. When changing batteries, the clock does not lose the current time setting (so it is not usually necessary to reset the time if one changes the batteries reasonably quickly). The radio also remembers the last frequencies tuned in each of the bands. There is no indicator for the state of charge of the battery, but this is probably too much to ask for in a radio of this size and cost. G. Instruction manual: Woefully inadequate and written in poor English. H. Pouch: In my opinion the pouch is unnecessarily large and unattractive. The pouch that came with my Eton-Grunding Mini400 radio is much nicer and more practical (and it fits the Eton Mini perfectly). I would have gladly paid a little more to get a pouch like that supplied with the Mini400. ADDED LATER ((2/27/2015): Since writing my earlier review of this radio, I have read quite a few other reviews where the reviewers were pleased with the sound quality. I thought that perhaps my radio was not typical or that my expectation was too high. I tried to "live" with it for a while, but it only confirmed my initial opinion of annoyingly poor sound quality and equally annoyingly slow increase in sound volume when tuning a low signal strength station on AM. So I went back to using my Grundig mini400, which has, in my view, very good sound quality with almost identical dimensions. Every now and then I would try the Eton Mini again, but put it back in the drawer. One time I found out that the short wave bands no long worked. I therefore ordered another one from Amazon hoping that my first radio had been an outlier. Unfortunately, the new one sounded exactly the same as the first one, but the sensitivity on the short wave bands was poorer (I used my Grundig Mini400 for comparison-- before it stopped working, the original Eton had similar sensitivity to the Grundig on SW). Consequently I returned the 2nd radio. So I still hold the same opinion expressed in my original review.