San Diego's Grace Digital has finally announced the release of its flagship Mondo Wi-Fi Music Player, first seen at CES 2011. The first of three new devices to swell the company's family of audio products, Mondo features a large high contrast color TFT display with adjustable brightness, can access thousands of online radio stations over a Wi-Fi connection, and is also capable of streaming music stored on a PC, Mac or network attached storage device.
Mondo features 802.11n Wi-Fi connectivity to join your home network and take advantage of some top internet-based streaming music, including Pandora, iHeartRadio, SiriusXM Internet Radio, NPR,CNN, BBC, NOAA, Weatherbug and 18,000 AM/FM/HD radio stations from around the globe. Its 3.5-inch LCD screen has 30 backlight brightness settings spread over three usage modes, and can display station logos and Pandora album artwork (when available). In addition to ten one-button presets for easy recall, users can also store up to 100 stations in a special folder.
The unit's clock is automatically adjusted to the correct time over the internet once the appropriate time zone is chosen, and it has five alarm settings and a dedicated snooze button, should you wish to use it as a bedside companion. There's a class D digital amplifier, and audio output of 12 watts via the 3-inch woofer and 1-inch tweeter. Mondo also sports left and right RCA out jacks for connection to a home Hi-Fi system, and USB port and auxiliary input for playing music from media sticks or players.
Mondo is mains-powered, but there's an optional Li-ion battery pack available for portability. It is compatible with freely available iOS/Android remote control apps, although it does come supplied with a remote control unit.
The Mondo Wi-Fi Music Player is available direct from Grace Digital in white or black for US$179.99.
Source: Mondo Wi-Fi Music Player
And why would I buy this when I can get the Sonos system: http://www.sonos.com/system/
The differences are:
- The Grace has a 3.5\" display verses a 2.4\' display on the competitior solution (40% larger vieweing area) - Grace has 10 presets instead of 6 - Grace has iHeartRadio - Grace has RCA line outputs to connect a home stereo (optionally) - Grace has a USB drive - Grace has a snooze / sleep bar on top of the radio and 5 alarms - Grace\'s optional battery pack provides 13 hours of music
The sonos is a nice system but 2-3x more expensive to buy both the speaker ( that has no display on it) and the proprietary wireless transmitter you have to plug into your wifi router. Grace is just plug and play.
Regards, Greg (Grace Digital)
thanks!