PURE One Elite DAB Radio Review
The Pure One Elite is a slightly more traditional entrant into our radio review lineup in that it lacks any sort of internet radio capability. If your home doesn’t have a WIFI network then the savings incurred by going with the DAB/FM-only One Elite should surely be welcome.
Stylistically the Pure One Elite is clean, simple and rigorously rounded off to produce an aesthetically pleasing shape. Alas it’s just a little too plain for me and I find myself wanting for a dash of chrome alongside a colour-accented gloss black body. As it is, it looks like a white kitchen appliance and if your kitchen is full of standard white appliances it’ll fit right in. If you’re a stainless steel or chrome fan then you might want to look at the Pure Evoke Flow instead, which oozes style but boasts a slightly different feature set.
On the top of the One Elite is a nicely concealed arial that clips neatly into a rounded groove. I generally find that DAB coverage is good enough in my house to never need the arial extended which means that the radio can easily be tucked onto a book shelf or into other tight spaces. Your mileage will, of course, vary depending on how good the DAB signal is in your area. Inhabitants of abandoned nuclear bunkers will probably want to give it a miss.
The Pure One Elite might only do FM and DAB, but that doesn’t mean it has no tricks up its sleeve. Perhaps the most interesting its the addition of a radio buffer, something normally used only in internet radio to ensure your listening pleasure isn’t interrupted by network hiccups. In the DAB world there’s no network to hiccup so the buffer instead lets you pause live radio for up to 15 minutes by simply pressing the ReVu, a somewhat odd name considering that radio, as far as I could tell, is an audio-only format!
Anyway, pressing the ReVu button will start a counter that lets you know how much of the buffer you have used. You can, for example, pause for 5 minutes of a really good song to answer a call of nature or of the telephone variety. On your return you can keep pausing and resuming until the counter hits 15 and you run out of buffer. Once this happens you’ll have to press and hold the ReVu button to clear the buffer before the pausing action can begin again.
If you want to get even more fancy then ReVu will let you rewind live radio for up to 15 minutes. A 15 minute buffer of the station you are listening to is maintained at all times so you can rewind and listen to your favourite songs or anything you might have missed by forgetting to hit pause. This functionality is quick and easy to use which is fortunate because I would imagine it getting little use if it wasn’t.
The PURE One Elite is a practical radio with 9 buttons surrounding a tuning/volume dial which is a button itself all providing quick and easy access to the features. A separate Standby button immediately puts the radio into standby mode, whereas the touch sensitive power button on the Evoke Flow, for example, will pop up a confirmation that you want to turn it off. It’s clear that Pure weren’t ready to compromise ease of use and functionality in the ONE range of radios, which results in them being a great and well rounded family product.
If you’re environmentally conscious then it might interest you to know that the ONE Elite uses about half the power of an average of the top 10 competing DAB radios, or so PURE say.
Overall, if you’re considering it then it might interest you to know that SoundAndVision stock it at £73.99 in black, green, red, silver and white.