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Philips AE5430 ... has the biggest speaker.

After a shaky start, portable digital radios have come of age. Rod Easdown looks at some of the options.

FOR ME the infuriating thing about that first wave of digital radios to hit the market wasn't the scarily high prices or the total lack of knowledge of the salespeople, it was that none of them sounded particularly good. In almost all cases it was difficult to pick any difference between digital and regular FM.

But lately the sound quality has been increasing in leaps and bounds and flipping from regular FM to digital (and many of them have an additional FM tuner) reveals a marked improvement in the music. And, it has to be said, a marked decrease in volume.

In every one we listened to, the volume level plummeted with the switch to digital and getting a level sufficient to hear throughout a normal room necessitated cranking the volume up to max.

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Sangean DPR-69 ... ordinary sound for the price.

There's been another change, too. Maybe someone finally told the manufacturers that we like portable radios. Digital portables hardly existed back in the early days of the format but now they're all over the place and I've seen them as cheap as $44.

Thus, with a new season kicking off for the NRL and the AFL, we figured a comparison of them would be timely.

There are some points to bear in mind. The first is that digitals only work in the major cities, so if you take your digital portable to an exhibition game in, say, Wagga Wagga, Toowoomba, Launceston or even Hobart, you'll only get the FM stations, and FM stations tend not to broadcast footy. Digital broadcasting is coming to regional areas but by all accounts it won't be any time soon.

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Three contenders ... portable digital radios