Straight out of the box, the sound one gets from the AV100, whether it is tuned to a strong FM signal or reproducing a well-engineered CD, is heavy on the bottom, masked on the top, and recessed in the middle. One thing unmentioned by the other reviewers is that this unit needs a month or more of break-in time before it begins performing even close to its best. It's simply that I feel amazingly lucky to have gotten this well-designed, well-made, quite cheap contraption that seems designed for someone whose design tastes are antiquarian verging on Luddite, whose listening tastes run to serious music, and whose audio tastes once ran to champagne but who, now having fallen on terribly hard times, must resign himself to living in a studio apartment in a building with hyperthin walls where, should he disturb the neighbors with Ockeghem or Webern, they would terminally disturb him right back with rap or grunge rock. Mind you, I did say I truly liked it, and I do. The other reviewers aside, how many iPod users could there be in the entire world who are also devotees of tube amplification applied, not to a megabuck, megawatt amp powering a pair of fifty-grand electrostatic-panel-cum-vented-port-subwoofer speaker systems, but to a tabletop radio that doesn't even sport a clock, let alone an alarm or two, and has no buttons and no presets and has to be tuned by hand with a single dial that serves the needs of both AM and FM? No, really, how many? Impracticality, thy name is AV100. The only way I can't imagine anyone using it is as an iPod docking station. This radio is an excellent product, whether one means to use it as a radio in the strict sense, as a near-high-fidelity midget-sized amplifier-speaker combination linked to a CD or an MP3 player or to a computer's audio output, or as a classically simple and attractively glowing box of tubes to lighten and warm a room of an evening.
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