Aimed at a younger audience than the traditional wood clad "woodies" that Pure are renowned for the One is a formation of brightly coloured plastic and modern styling cues. Measuring 210 x 145 x 72mm it is most definitely portable and none too heavy with batteries or Pure's charge Pak fitted. The front the unit is relatively simple looking with a unassuming grill covering the 3" full range drive unit and the right hand side housing the controls. Under the now de rigeur backlit blue LCD screen lies a horse shoe of control with a large central selector knob / button.

There is a large and quite sturdy telescopic aerial ensuring good RF performance, this is one of the few non moulded plastic bits of the One. the new Pure radio ship sin  a number of colours from black and silver to a hugely shocking bright pink!

Power up the Pure One and after a brief search for stations you are greeted with a surprisingly warm sound from such a small box. Pure pride themselves on getting the best sound from any enclosure and while the One doesn't have the best size or materials for a perfect sound the boys at Kings Langley have does a great job in engineering the best sound possible from this little box. Audio quality is first class as we'd expect form a good DAB radio, however the One does manage to produce a good level of bass without resonating the plastic casing which we are sure many of the competition would have failed to achieve. You will need to crank the volume of the One past 60% to get a decent output level but the reward is a high quality sound which is clear and crisp and free of electronic noise and hiss.

Sitting at the more accessible end of the price scale the Pure One doesn't skimp of the features either, we've all come to expect a large LCD (2 x 16 characters) and the array of scrolling text but then One goes, dare we say, One step beyond. For a start there is a combined FM (RDS) / DAB tuner which means that should you stray into a poor DAB reception area or find a station that is only on FM then your One can still pick it up.

Plus those who have had a chance to see the range topping Evoke 3 will be surprised to see some of those features making it onto the £50 One DAB unit. There is a really nifty feature called "text scan" or as we called it sticky text, this allows you to push the main control button and then scroll through the normally scrolling text that many stations broadcast, this is perfect on a station like 5 live. Then add the latest bit of techy innovation from pure "intellitext" which makes its debut on the One. Intellitext offers the ability for radio stations to offer up short chunks of text based information classified by type, consider it if you will as an RSS feed over DAB radio.

We tried this out on Talk Sport which had different text strings for football, rugby and F1 on the day we tested, you can easily select and then use the sticky text to scroll through, it works very well and is a great extra feature. It does make you wonder how long it will be before someone pops a WiFi card into a DAB radio and you can then access a link in the scrolling text to say the artists website or the news story?

But back to there here and now and next up it was time to take the One on a portable trip, we didn't have a ChargePak to test with so instead we used 6 C cell batteries, the display has a built in battery meter which helps you check how much juice you have left which is essential when the DAB chipsets seem to be so hungry. We managed to eek a little over 26 hours listening from the batteries which is about par for a modern DAB radio.

Overall this Pure One DAB radio is a major success for Pure digital, it manages to be a quality DAB device in keeping with the technical tradition yet it breaks the mould away from the woodies and is attractive to a younger market. It performs as well as its more expensive brothers and sisters and even packs a few extra features most them don't yet have. All of this for £50, the Pure One shows the way forward for DAB radio in the UK, more accessible, portable and yet affordable.

Published - 27/05/2006

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