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Just bought yet ANOTHER Insignia portable HD radio

N

nd2023

Banned
So my portable HD radio kicked the bucket again. It almost died in August but I was able to revive it. Well, it did the same thing again, the backlight stayed on with nothing displaying and none of the buttons work. Resetting it by sticking a paper clip in the reset hole didn't work. Letting the battery die by leaving it alone for 2 days didn't work. Freezing it outside overnight didn't work. Heating it up by putting it on top of the radiator didn't work. It's almost impossible to open.

Between August and now, I didn't listen to the radio much. But since the all-Christmas music started, I've been using my Insignia HD radio a lot more.

I made another trip to Best Buy and bought another Insignia portable HD radio. The fourth one I bought in two years. This time, I got a 2 year extended warranty for an additional $15. I never buy the extended warranty on anything, but given its track record, the extended warranty on this HD radio will likely be used. It'll save me $200 if I have to buy another 4 HD radios in the next 2 years. Who knows if HD radio will even exist 2 years from now.

So here's how my HD radios died

1st - Purchased Black Friday 2009. Lasted until September 2010 when I dropped it and it lost its sensitivity.
2nd - Purchased in September 2010. Lasted until February 2011 when the screen stopped working.
3rd - Purchased in February 2011. Lasted until December 10 when it froze. Almost died in August.
4th - Purchased on December 14. When will it die?

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result. But till there's something better, this has the best reception out of any portable radio. I hate IBOC, but love this radio. At least if when this breaks within 2 years, I won't have to spend another $50.
 
Wow! I can only think of one or two radios that I've let fall by the wayside over the years.

Even the "digital" 1986 Sangean 803 ATS has had 4-5 "deaths" that were reversible.

May I recommend a mid-1930s Philco or Zenith?
They can be made to run almost forever, and are not at all hard to open or repair. :D

Wait a minute. Isn't the Insignia that radio that only goes down to 88 mhz?
Never mind.
 
"Letting the battery die by leaving it alone for 2 days didn't work. Freezing it outside overnight didn't work. Heating it up by putting it on top of the radiator didn't work. It's almost impossible to open."

Gee, you wonder why your receiver was giving you trouble? I'm surprised you didn't add "running it over with an 18-wheeler didn't work" to your list! Brother. I had a first-generation unit for about two years (got lost moving flats, I think) and didn't have the least bit of trouble with it.

But then, I usually try to make a point of "handling my equipment carefully" where/when feasible.....
 
It's not my problem that this HD radio is so flimsy that it can't handle normal use for a long time. I tried those measures after it failed in an attempt for it to work.

My Eton E100 portable radio is much more durable. It's been dropped a good number of times, and been used in temperatures below 0 and above 100. Still works today. I "retired" it in 2009 when I got the Insignia portable because it isn't as sensitive or selective and doesn't have HD reception, and it's 4 times the size.
 
A small, hard, slippery item designed for "portable" use is going to be dropped. Period. The kind of incidents Nick is describing are inevitable, and pieces like the Insignia better be designed for them or there's going to be an unacceptably high failure rate (as is apparently happening.)

My iPod has been dropped onto a hard tile floor several times and has been yanked out of the cupholder on the treadmill at the gym. More than once it's landed on the moving track before I could "pause" it and has gotten launched, more than once bouncing off a neighboring treadmill, also in use. It still works fine. Because it's not a piece of crap.

Of course, my iPod is not an HD Radio. iPods sell in the millions every year in many configurations. Insignia HD portables have sold, what, maybe 12 thousand? Gee. Wonder why...?
 
Are you using it for the HD channels? If not you should probably get something else. I like the radio in my Sansa Clip+, although you have to wait for the screen to shutoff to get the best reception. It has a great analog tuner for a small MP3 player, plus its very durable and cheap.

The FM radios used in MP3 players, phones, etc are usually chip based and should be pretty reliable since there are no moving parts.
 
Just looked up the Insignia.

It's not really a radio, it's just a tuner. ::)

Not only does it not have AM, it has no speaker!
Crazy, man! I'd have to also drag around some kind of amplifier/speaker combination to use it as a radio.
Sounds like the height of inconvenience to me.
There's almost no situation where I could or would want to use headphones for radio.
I insist on using headphones when doing audio mastering work, but that's not at all like "listening to" radio.

Perhaps I could plug it into the line in jack of a RADIO or something that does have a speaker.

In the 'way back days unscrupulous dealers advertised radio prices minus the tubes that would need to be purchased seperately
to use the thing.

This is no different.
Maybe today it's possible to sell "brooms" which are just a round stick, and you
have to come up with some bristly things yourself to bind to the end.
 
I have a ZUNE. It works rather well, so far. With 32 gigs, it holds a lot of music (4,996 tunes thus far). The HD tuner is satisfactory. That means it works if an HD signal can be detected.

Wouldn't you know? It is discontinued. Oh, my my. So much for the faith in FM-HD technology.
 
It's more an indictment of Insignia's quality than HD radio, but the inSanity people are doing themselves no favors hitching their wagons to such a shoddy manufacturer.

I've got two units, 2nd and 3rd gen if I'm not mistaken. Both work fine and both have good battery life but they are definitely quirky. The newer one has excellent analog reception but the RDS and HD are "troubled" to put it lightly. The older one's analog is completely useless but the HD and RDS work far better than the newer unit.

And both go below 88 MHz, to 87.7. Oh, you meant AM? Yeah, no AM but many markets have AMs on HD now. We get our local news talker on an HD-2, and last time I was in St. Louis I listened to KMOX on an HD-2 or 3. Worked fine and sounded better than the hissy HD AM feed.
 
Reality check:

Defective products do/will get shipped and sold. It happens to every manufacturer and vendor that has ever existed; it isn't some recent phenomenon that only affects products using Ibiquity tech. Abusing an obviously defective product in an attempt to "fix" it, as Nick apparently seems to have taken to doing, will only make a broken device function worse.

(And it makes me sit back and laugh heartily at all the clueless individuals with defective equipment, who choose to play the "blame it on the underlying technology" card. Hilarious!)
 
I got it on Christmas 2010 and it still works great and hasn't shown any signs of dying. I got it refurbished also. *Knock on wood*
 
Okay, so compete the circle-o-reasoning. So one guy allegedly abuses a receiver, that makes it work worse or quit completely, and that proves...um....that the underlying technology is fine???

Of course some examples of a product are defective. Although, frankly, I've never heard of one instance of an iPod with factory defects (and yes, I'm sure it happens.) But it's a matter of degree with a body of experience which either tends or tends not to make the case that any given product is either a high-quality one...or a POS. Reading the totality of posts here leads a reasonable observer to conclude that the Insignia is not a top-quality radio. Look at the track record and draw the conclusion you like: dropped-and-quit, screen went out, locks up, fatal firmware crashes. And it's not just one guy.

And as unfair as it may seem, problems with a receiver do redound to the disadvantage of the underlying system. If SatRadio always works fine but there's a best-selling (for HD) HD Radio product, sorry, but IBOC's gonna get a black eye in part. It's the way the world of consumer electronics works.
 
OK, I have read this thread with some interest and will weigh in on the Insignia portable. I've bought multiples of this model because of the DSP technology that is necessary for the "HD" portion to be of any use - in other words, I love the selectivity of it and the convenience of having that selectivity in a small package where I don't need a whip antenna. Long sentence, I know - but it sums up the why. That is has HD is interesting, but is also annoying at times.

The built in, unchangeable, battery would appear to give this model a built-in end date. That's not good. However, after 2 1/2 years, I haven't reached it on either of my active Insignia portables. My first has issues with a loose connection which causes the left channel to cut out. Placing a small clamp, which squeezes the radio, ameliorates this issue. That earliest version takes more signal to kick into HD mode. My more recent one is about 18 months old and works perfectly.

Yes, I've dropped each of them once or twice - the first one was dropped hard once. It probably contributed to the audio issue with the left channel. That said, I tend to take good care of my equipment and am not abusive. I don't see that they're any more fragile than other radios that I own. In some ways, less so. I dropped a Sangean DT-220A onto the floor from only about 2' up and lost all AM reception.

No, under normal use, I've found these Insignia portables to be as durable as any other radio - no more so, no less so.

Now, the unchangeable rechargeable battery is another issue because that guarantees built-in obsolescence. That was a very bad plan. Tecsun has a portable DSP "Walkman" style radio (DR-777) with a battery that's a rechargeable similar to the Insignia. However, that one can be changed out if it dies. Which tells you that the Insignia folks weren't planning on you using your NS-HD001 for too many years!
 
Conserve your Insignias, men! Who knows? Maybe they'll sell for hundreds on eBay some day (these days you can get 'em for less than $20.) I can forsee HD receivers as being curiosities for oddball-electronics collectors, like the guys who restore Chrysler Highway-HiFi players.

Another thought on the Insignias. Nick reports he left his portable outside overnight and on a radiator. So, this qualifies as "abuse??" What, you can't leave your Insignia in your car overnight in the Northeast? You can't leave it on a windowsill in the bright sunlight or locked in your car in the summertime? I do these things all the time with my iPod with zero ill effects.

So, what are Insignia users supposed to do? Wrap them in pink perfumed cotton in a humidity-controlled vessel every night - or else they crap out?? ???
 
What, you can't leave your Insignia in your car overnight in the Northeast? You can't leave it on a windowsill in the bright sunlight or locked in your car in the summertime? I do these things all the time with my iPod with zero ill effects.
Click to expand...

This triggers an early childhood memory; when 4 door cars had that space behind the back seats and the rear window. Usually with a single speaker mounted in it. Over time, that back speaker would get it's share of spilled malts, and melted crayon left in the back window to "cure".

But wait, perhaps that's just how to harden an Insignia. Just leave it under the back window, in full sunshine. Place a couple of your kids crayons over it and let the sunlight create a protective cocoon of melted Crayola product. Hint: the end product will be more attractive if you remove the paper from the crayons first.
 
The first Insignia (NS-HD01) I got is the most used one. Granted, I baby all of my electronic devices, no matter what the price. I did leave it a couple of times in a cold car overnight, but the only thing to happen was the LCD moved slower (der!).
 
I find it interesting that people are crying about the non-replaceable battery in the Insignia as a sign of cheapness, but how do you replace a battery in an iPod?

You take it to Apple and pay too much for a new one!

Planned obsolescence is a beautiful thing to manufacturers because it ensures a steady revenue stream. And for the record, iPods have historically been reliable but not without their growing pains. The difference is Apple is awesome about overbuilding quality and fixing issues, Insignia is just junk pretending to compete.
 
[quote ]
... how do you replace a battery in an iPod?

You take it to Apple and pay too much for a new one!
[/quote]

This is why I avoid Ipods.
 
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