On 5 March my new Roberts Revival RD 60 DAB/FM Radio arrived. Before I bought it I spent quite a bit of time checking it out on the Internet as I tend to do with everything I buy these days.

In fact I’d been wanting to buy a Roberts Revival radio for ages. I really like the 50s styling and the 50s construction holds promise for rather a good radio.

The Revival has similar styling to the 1956 Roberts R66. It is a simple design unlike the other well known retro, the Bush TR82 which is a very heavily styled radio.

However for me the Roberts has a great deal of class. I remember Roberts radios from the eighties. They were still put together in a small factory in England and sold for a lot more money than the competition from Japan. I remember thinking there was something rather nice about putting some money into a radio like the Roberts, placing a lot of value on an object which will be with you for many years. However, at the time I bought a much cheaper Japanese alternative and it was very good.

Today Roberts are, I think, much more like the any other modern manufacturer. You don’t know where they are built, no doubt parts come from all over the world, probably assembled in different countries. The modern day Roberts radio range spans all price bands competing head on with the other manufacturers, in fact my kitchen radio is a Roberts radio, it is a plastic moulded one like those eighties Japanese imports. Its rather nice but not what Roberts represents for me.

The Roberts radios of the 50s and 60s upon which the Revival is based were rather good designs which leant themselves to future updating I think. The controls were inset on the top so to create a contemporary version it is easy to include a digital display and any configuration of buttons you like in that inset area on the top without changing the overall look of the radio.

I spent ages choosing the colour.

• Red
• Green
• Blue
• Burgundy
• Pastel Blue
• Pastel Cream
• Pastel Pink
• Washed Rose – Cath Kidston
• Piano Black

I got the green one. I know I made the right decision, I liked the idea of piano black, but I just thought that on a portable it would be a smeared mess pretty soon. It is actually green leatherette, (leatherette = leather like plastic). Roberts do a visually very similar radio called the Revival R250 and that is available with real leather, but that is an FM only radio whereas the RD60, my one, is DAB as well as FM. I might have rather liked real leather, but I haven’t seen one in the, er, flesh and I knew that I wanted a DAB radio so leatherette it had to be. The aerial and other metal parts are all gold which look very well with the green.

I wanted a DAB radio because oddly enough, very occasionally BBC Radio Three goes wonky on me in FM. I live very close to the nearest transmitter, three miles, and BBC Radio Four is never affected. However I listen to Radio Three most of the time so I wanted consistency.

The sound quality of the Revival RD60 is very respectable given the size of the radio. Peering in through the grill on the front reveals that the speaker is very small and yet the sound is very full bodied with apparently a lot of bass. The reason for so much bass from such a small speaker is that the radio body, the speaker enclosure, is a port reflex design. The port is forward firing and in the centre of the grill on the front. The speaker is surprisingly far left. I think the speaker is in its location to make room for the batteries.

The casework of the RD 60 is pleasingly straightforward. the back panel is totally flat without decoration. How I wish more designers would embrace this kind of unadorned simplicity.

The door on the back is held shut by a catch which I’m pretty sure is from the furniture world. I rather like this as the radio’s case is I guess a very small piece of furniture, like a music box perhaps. I think one of the reasons why the radio has appeal for me is that it does fit in with with furnishings and interior decor. At some point audio equipment very clearly defined a look and feel quite distinct from the other items we have in the living room. More so with the electronic component boxes than the speakers. For some reason we want the latter to be nicely finished wood but the former is to be high tech boxes.

Opening the door on the back reveals the interior of course. Roughly in the middle is the reflex port. I think the speaker looks bigger in the pic than it actually is. At the bottom is the container for batteries. It takes four D batteries and these do seem to last for a long time, which is rather good. I find I like to lug this radio around the house with me and so I don’t want to have to keep it plugged in to the mains all the time.

If someone from 1956 were looking into this radio they would be wondering what had happend to the electronics? I’m pretty sure they are all at the top inside that black plastic casing.

That the box is mostly empty doesn’t mean it is a waste of space. The comparatively large box is good for sound quality. Especially given that it is made of MDF, thought by many speaker designers to be the best material for enclosures. When the rear door is shut there is quite a good seal with the casing, but it is not the kind of arrangement you would find in a hi-fi speaker where the casing would be absolutely sealed up except for the reflex port. The seal is good enough though as opening the door while the radio is on leads to a drastic loss in bass.

The sound quality is very contemporary radio I think. There is ample bass for a radio of this size and absolutely no bloom whatsoever. This is a very well behaved radio. Voices are clear and distinct. I can’t detect any real difference between DAB and FM, but I wouldn’t have expected a difference on a portable radio like this.

I’ve used the auxiliary out socket with Pro-Ject Head Box II headphone amplifier and my Sennheiser HD 540 Ref. Gold headphones. It sounds very listenable with a surprising amount of detail, so the small tuner is doing a good job I guess. I don’t know how it would sound with other quality headphones because my beloved Sennheiser HD 540 Ref. Golds are very good at making things sound better than they are. More analytically honest headphones might not sound very good on the radio, but that would be true of any radio.

Using cheap headphones into the actual headphone socket, which would be more usual, is quite fine. It’s much the same as any personal radio. I’ve found that in this pleasant weather we are having (June) I like to take my Roberts RD60 into the garden with me. I use headphones because I don’t want to disturb the neighbours with radio. I prefer the RD60 for this to a personal pocket sized radio because I am in a pocketless mode and the RD60 will sit very squarely on the grass and is so easy to change volume or station.

On hearing of Michael Jackson’s death I found myself downloading some of his music and viewing his performances on YouTube.

When Jackson was at his absolute height of fame, releasing Thriller I was spending a great deal of my time in nightclubs, doing all the youth type things. If you’d asked me if I liked Michael Jackson I would have said no. I would have believed my answer to be honest, but in fact when Michael Jackson was played I loved it on the dancefloor, the strange thing is I didn’t really notice this anomaly. At the time I was only into groups that were “cool” and had a sense of authenticity about them. Michael Jackson was more from the showbiz world and someone I would have turned my nose up at.

I don’t listen to pop music at home now at all unless it comes on the radio. However listening to Michael Jackson’s music I can see now that it was no coincidence that he worked so well on the dancefloor.

In the later years his life was overshadowed by various allegations and his own eccentric behaviour. However if we put that aside then we see that as an entertainer he really was unparalleled.

Personally I believe he was a harmless individual who was very immature. In time we will come to see the pillaring he received as being indicative of a terrible failing of ours not to simply allow people to be different.

He was the victim of an angry small minded mob. If we think of his attempts to change his appearance as being like that of Frankenstein’s to create the monster, then we have played the role of the torch carrying mob in the Shelley’s tale.