Those of you lucky enough to get a new gadget in your Christmas stocking this year might have ended up with a FREECOM MUSICPAL Internet clock-radio. This funky little piece of kit looks like a neat clock radio but will access some 12,000 radio stations from across the globe via your home wi-fi wireless network (or next-door's if he's forgotton to add an encryption key!)and also play all your music saved as MP3 files on your PC. It also has headphone and line-out sockets on the back - I have coupled mine to a reasonable quality 2.1 (subwoofer + 2 satellite speakers) self amplified speaker set and it really is superb for the money. I can play all my music in the bedroom at a volume / quality you would only get from a fairly expensive boom-box or mini hi-fi a few years ago plus all these internet radio services, which I can search by genre and so receive exactly what I want to fit my mood. It is particularly useful here in the valley I live in because there is no DAB signal at all so using digital services such as BBC Radio 7 would previously have used one of our precious PCs or laptops, which are so passionatley fought over by family members! I encountered one problem when setting it up which was that initially, it would not stream any BBC channels or other mainstream UK channels such as London's LBC and they don't appear when you initially search for stations. The FAQs on the manufacturer's website are extremely confusing, stating that the unit is only compatible with MP3 and WMA streams and cannot be used with sites such as the BBC which stream in RealMedia. In reality, when you go to the website, BBC sites do come up straight away and stream in WMA. Therefore, all you need to do is update the firmware to the newest version. Do it via the inbuilt menus - it's easy. Then go back to your "web favourites" stations and the BBC streams will work fine. The built in speaker (mono) is alright for using it as a clock radio but not for serious use - the line-out and headphone sockets mean you can amp-it-up to your heart's content. That's what makes this unit so useful. Competetively priced, easy to set up and the outputs offer the potential for professional quality sound.