Hotwired: Tivoli AM/FM tuner

The Tivoli Model One is currently one of the top-selling home entertainment devices.

Gift-wrapped in your Easter basket you could easily imagine the Tivoli Model One was a luxurious, hollow chocolate egg - that's about the size of it.

The Model One is in fact a table radio - an AM/FM tuner, speaker and volume control in a wooden box, designed for use wherever you want to listen to the radio.

Simple, old-fashioned, analogue and costing $299, it is, surprisingly, one of the top-selling home entertainment devices of the new millennium. Boston-based Tivoli Audio manufacture literally millions annually, of which the local distributors expect to sell close to 3000 units this year.

Audio design genius Henry Kloss was approaching his 70th birthday when he knocked up what has since become a design classic, a mono radio that is so good it has re-launched the product category. Since the Model One was launched in 2000, Tivoli have spun off a range of lookalike units ranging from subwoofers to iPod playback systems.

As with many design classics it is the combination of absolute simplicity and performance which has made it a worldwide phenomenon. The Model One sound is praised for richness, warmth of tone and clarity.

The technology hidden behind the simple facade provides higher fidelity sound reproduction and better reception than you would possibly expect from an Easter-egg-sized radio. The wooden surround, over-sized tuning knob, high-quality 3-inch speaker and clever sound contouring combine with discrete-component FM tuning, originally developed for cellphones, which delivers great reception and clarity on closely spaced FM stations.

One of the first spinoffs from the Model One was the PAL (Portable Audio Laboratory), a splash-proof go anywhere version powered by a rechargeable NiMH battery. The $349 PAL also adds an auxiliary input to connect a CD, MP3 player, or other device, and a headphone output, which is also a recording output, or an outboard tuner for another system.

The Tivoli Audio design team annually selects a range of colours based on European fashion trends as previewed on the runways of Milan, for the PAL Fashion Collection limited collector's series - making it kind of the audio version of Swatch watches. The iPAL is, not surprisingly, a colour-matched variation to play your iPod through.

Even the Tivoli naming is ridiculously simple. Model Two is a stereo version while the Model Three is a bedside clock radio.

Kloss is dead, but his designs stand as a permanent testament to his passion for fine audio and simplicity. In a world where $300 can buy you a 5.1 home entertainment sound system, who would have thought we would still be prepared to pay the same amount for a mono table radio?