Retro Clock Radio

Y100 lives on

Since Y-Not began broadcasting at ynotradio.net, Landow has paid all fees -- about $1,000 a month, including streaming, royalties and promotion -- out of his own pocket, supported by a part-time job at radio trade magazine FMQB. He earns no salary and all of the DJs work for free. Ideally, Landow would like to get sponsors or partner with another organization, but doing things like selling ads isn't part of his DNA. Recently the station has started taking donations to defray costs. The number of people tuning into Y-Not fluctuates, but on a recent Wednesday morning, 93 were listening. He admits it's not a huge number and it's a far cry from the average 384,000 weekly listeners logged by Arbitron in Y100's final years. But Landow is philosophical. "It's just nice to know someone's listening." Y-Not broadcasts via Internet radio network Live 365, which calculates the popularity of a station by measuring listener hours. As of Monday, Y-Not had logged 21,361 total listening hours. Its first death was February 2005, during a wave of format-switches away from alternative rock, when owners Radio One decided to switch to a more popular hip-hop sound. Program manager Jim McGuinn led the troops to a spare room in his South Philly house and Y100 Rocks was born. "I thought that if we kept the audience together in one place and we kept some semblance of a staff, that someone with an FM frequency might be enticed to relaunch the format," said McGuinn, now a program director at the Current, a public-radio station in St. Paul, Minn. The freedom of Internet radio was exhilarating for McGuinn and Landow, especially after the increasingly corporate management of the final years of Y100. "For the people who worked at the original Y100, doing the Internet thing was getting back to why we got into the business in the first place," McGuinn said. "We were the people that wanted to come over and sit on your couch and play you some really cool record that we found. The Internet enables us to get back to that initial impulse that brings most people to radio, or should." With little to no competition in the alternative market at that time and a mailing list of 50,000 email addresses, Y100 Rocks thrived. "It accidentally became a business and a thriving Internet radio station," McGuinn said, who credits volunteers for helping the station file for taxes and make sure everything was legal.

The Cue r1 Clock Radio Defies Retro Look - NYTimes.com

Then there is the appearance: With its white plastic rectangular case, minimalist three knobs and black-and-white display, the Cue r1 looks like it might have come from a Scandinavian furniture store circa 1968.

Except for one detail: There is an iPod dock on top.

In other ways, the Cue is thoroughly modern. For one, you can have its 3-inch screen display what is playing on your iPod, which is useful if you are using a small-screen Nano.

Setup is easy, even without using the owner’s manual. You dial through menus to set anything from the brightness of the screen, to equalization settings for your music, to your preferred wake-up time.

The Cue has two 25-watt amplifiers, which pump out respectable sound, if at somewhat less-than-audiophile quality.

Available with either a white or black cabinet, the Cue base model costs $400. An additional $100 gets you an auxiliary speaker, which greatly boosts the power and clarity of the Cue’s sound.

Having listened with and without, I would recommend the second speaker, which can be bought with the main radio at a slight discount of $480 for the pair directly from Cue Acoustics .

The radio includes an FM antenna, but you’ll have to supply your own iPod or iPhone, as well as an era-appropriate copy of “ Incense and Peppermints ” on vinyl.

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