Terratec’s Noxon iRadio sounds like a good idea, but it’s fairly expensive and the poor manual meant that we struggled to get it working properly.

The iRadio looks like a fairly conventional digital radio. However, instead of picking up radio signals broadcast over the airwaves, it connects to your home network and picks up radio stations broadcast over the internet. It can also be used to play music stored on your PC or Mac.

You can connect the iRadio to your network wirelessly or by using an ordinary Ethernet cable. It’s got its own built-in speaker, but there are two additional audio connectors so that you can plug in a set of headphones or connect it to an amplifier.

The radio side of things works perfectly well. A simple setup wizard helps you connect the iRadio to the internet and download a list of radio stations from a service called Vtuner. The Vtuner service can connect you to hundreds of radio stations, including all the BBC stations as well as delights such as Radio Cairo and Echo Of Moscow. It's also able to subscribe to podcasts.

We had no trouble getting the iRadio to play any of these stations, but things got tricky when we tried to play some mp3 files that were stored on our PC. Terratec supplies a piece of software called Twonky Vision, which acts as a media-server that transmits music across your network from the PC to the iRadio.

However, this software was written by another company, Twonky Media, and its manual doesn’t specifically tell you how to make the Twonky Vision software work with the iRadio. We got there in the end, but it was a struggle, and as Terratec’s technical support centre is in Germany you could end up with a nasty phone bill if you need any help.

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