Roberts R100

WHAT IS THE ROBERTS R100?

The Roberts R100 is a multi-room ‘base station’ that can just as happily be used as a simple DAB kitchen radio.

Unlike Sonos kit, it’s not closed off from other devices, and doesn’t have to be controlled from your phone. It’s a meeting of the old and new(er) worlds of home audio.

The Roberts R100 costs £249, making it expensive for a radio, but reasonable for a multi-room speaker with all the features it offers. Still, the Sonos Play:1 sounds better.

ROBERTS R100 — DESIGN

Tech fans might find the Roberts R100 familiar. It’s the stylistic progeny of the Sonos Play: 1 and the B&O BeoLit 12 from way back in 2012. That last one is a lovely speaker, but at £600 has a fairly narrow, affluent audience in mind.

Aiming right at the mainstream buyer, the Roberts R100 wants to replace your DAB radio and your hifi. It’s not quite as it appears, though.

The carry handle screams “I’m portable”, but there’s no inbuilt battery. You can get one, but it costs an extra £40, almost enough to bump the Roberts R100 up into another price class.

It’s neat hardware, though, doing its best to balance the priorities of practicality and flat-out looking nice. There’s a real-metal grille that winds around the R100’s sides and back, a real leather carry handle, and the rest is plastic.

Having a slanted control panel of buttons and a display on the top means the Roberts R100 isn’t a beauty, but this layout is handy. Roberts may sell this as a multi-room base unit, but it has the accessibility of a DAB radio.

There’s no fiddly touchscreen either, just a pretty intuitive series of buttons matched with a familiar, perhaps even off-the-shelf software interface. A radio-style aerial extends out of the top plate rather than the rear too, meaning you can push the R100 right against the wall if needed.

 The Roberts R100 is not super-small, but its footprint is similar to a Roberts Revival radio, for example. It should fit onto windowsills and kitchen worktops if that’s the space you have to fill.

The R-Line series of speakers is a bold move for Roberts, but its abilities are familiar. This is a wireless speaker, but one much more open than something like a Sonos. It can play audio from a very diverse range of sources.

There’s Spotify Connect, Bluetooth, streaming from collections shared over Wi-Fi, Internet radio, DAB radio and FM. A 3.5mm socket on the back lets you plug-in non-wireless sources too.

The Roberts R100 has a friendly, old-fashioned side that you just don’t get with a Sonos speaker. However, if you don’t use Spotify this does mean you’re left using Bluetooth as there’s no more specific support for Deezer, Tidal, Google Music or anything else.

There is a smartphone app for this speaker. It’s Undok, a third-party multi-room platform rather than one made specifically for Roberts gear. I’ve only used one other brand that has used it so far, Goodmans with the Heritage Portable radio, but Revo, Ruark and Bush are other recognisable Undok clients.

Undok is what turns a normal Wi-Fi speaker into a multi-room one. The tech lets you group together others speakers in the Undok-supporting family together to create a multi room system. It’s not as impressive software as Sonos’s, which is much more stylish and crams in more streaming services, but works very well. It’s quick, it’s clear and it lets you more-or-less control every main Roberts R100 feature.

 You can switch between sources, even the aux input, and it’s a far better way to browse internet radio stations, which seem endless when you’re scrolling through them on the fairly prosaic on-speaker interface.

The Roberts R100 is a multi-room speaker where the ‘multi-room’ bit is a nice extra rather than a feature that sits front and centre.

ROBERTS R100 — SOUND QUALITY

This speaker is just part of the Roberts R-Line multi-room family. There are already several other models, including a soundbar and others that look like more conventional wireless speakers.

The R100 is the most DAB radio-alike of the lot. Sound quality is mixed across the range, but good on this specific speaker, which is able to go much, much louder than any traditional DAB radio.

This is the sort of radio I have been awaiting for a while, something roughly comparable with a classic DAB set that uses the tricks of modern wireless speakers to produce a much larger sound.

 We all turned up in the same dress. It was so embarassing (L-R: Sonos Play:1, Roberts R100, Riva S)

The difference? Where a classic radio this size might use one or two (up to) 3-inch drivers, the Roberts R100 has two small treble drivers, one large bass driver and a bass radiator. This uses the air moved by the big driver to push yet another flat driver that amplifies bass. It’s what makes getting good bass out of a tiny little speaker like the Bose SoundLink Mini possible.

I’ve happily been using the Roberts R100 as my main day-time music listening speaker for a week or so now, and it just doesn’t have the sense of sound compromise you get with even the best traditional DAB radios.

However, it doesn’t sound good straight out of the box. The Roberts R100’s default DSP (digital signal processing) is quite horrible, with a wilfully over-emphasised treble that makes it seems like the bass/treble drivers are not just poorly integrated, but at war with each other. This tends to make higher-register vocals sound quite acidic.