These days, you don’t see a lot of wood in consumer electronics. Everything’s plastic, glass, or metal, with wood only showing up as a faux finish on occasion. Grace Digital Audio changes this with its Victoria Nostalgic Internet Radio, a Wi-Fi-equipped Internet radio that evokes a 1940s tabletop radio. It looks great, oozes retro appeal, and can access thousands of Internet radio stations and services, but its big ($229.99 direct) price tag and limited audio prowess keeps it from being a must-have device.

Design
The Victoria is very similar to Grace Digital’s previous Wi-Fi Internet Radio ($169.99, 3 stars) or Livio NPR Radio ($149.99, 3.5 stars), but with a much more attractive design. Its main appeal is that it looks faux-old timey, and at this it modestly succeeds. The radio measures 7.8 by 12.3 by 5.6 inches (HWD) and has a nice wood finish. The grille is old-fashioned and minimalistic, but the plain brown fabric behind it covering the drivers doesn’t have the texture and elegance of radios of the 1940s, and looks a bit more plain. The display frame and controls are brown plastic, detracting from the radio’s look. A more elaborate fabric behind the grille and brass or at least faux brass knobs and buttons would have gone a long way in making the radio look authentically classic and vintage.

The radio has four buttons and two knobs, which let you comfortably input passwords and other login information and navigate Internet radio stations. Reply (to display interactive menus in services like Pandora), Preset, Home, and Back buttons sit below the four-line, blue-and-white LCD, and below them are large Power/Volume and Navigate/Select button-knobs. The back of the radio holds RCA stereo inputs and outputs, a headphone jack, a USB port, the power cable jack, and the power switch. It’s curious that the auxiliary input is RCA stereo and not 3.5mm, which would ordinarily mean you can’t plug in your iPhone or other smartphone or media player. Fortunately, Grace Digital includes an RCA to 3.5mm cable, so you can just plug in any audio device. Since there's no Ethernet jack, Wi-Fi is your only option for accessing Internet radio.

The 5.5-inch-long remote is surprisingly large and bulky for an Internet radio. Most devices of this size use small membrane remotes, but the Victoria’s remote feels more like it could go with a DVD player. It has plenty of rubber buttons, including a number pad, navigation pad, and playback controls. It even has special Pandora buttons for approving, disapproving, and fast forwarding through tracks. It’s good for controlling music as it plays, but for inputting text the knobs on the radio itself is much faster.

Performance
The radio is loaded with tons of different media sources. Through Wi-Fi (802.11n), you can access thousands of streaming Internet radio stations organized by genre or location, or access specific services like Pandora, Live365, Rhapsody, and Sirius XM. Unfortunately, because of the small screen and limited controls, navigating many of these choices is clunky. Fortunately, you can make your way to your favorite station with a few twists of the knob, once you get used to the layout of the radio’s many, many layers of menus. Setting up Wi-Fi is easy; it automatically scans for local hot spots and prompts you to enter whatever security measures are used. I connected to the lab Wi-Fi network in just a minute of dial-twisting to enter the password.

There's a built-in mono speaker that can capably play music, but most of the time you’ll find the audio quality limited by the radio station stream. Different stations stream with different bitrates and file formats, and that can affect the sound quality greatly. WNYC’s stream is a 96Kbps MP3 that sounds quite nice and clear, but the NOAA weather station sounds like something that was spoken into a walkie-talkie, recorded, and played back into another walkie-talkie. Your best bet for audio quality is to directly connect your smartphone or media player to the radio’s auxiliary input and play music directly through it, and even then the radio’s single driver still won’t provide sound that sounds as good or as loud as a dedicated stereo speaker dock of similar size and price.

At $230, the Grace Digital Audio Victoria Nostalgic Internet Radio is pricey for a device that doesn’t work particularly well as a speaker dock and doesn’t do anything you can’t do more easily on a computer. However, it looks very nice and its integrated Wi-Fi lets you access thousands of Internet radio stations and music services in rooms where you might not want to park your computer. If you’re looking for a snazzy Internet radio and have the money to spend, it’s a nice way to bring modern music and old-time wood aesthetics to your bedroom, kitchen, or living room.

More Media Hub and Receiver reviews: