Roberto Machorro

After a while of having the XACT Visor (read my review about it), I was ready for something more. Since I liked the Visor’s quality, I went back to XACT’s website and took a look. I found the Replay (XTR8CK) and when I saw the features and the price I was happy as can be. I bought a package at Costco that for $119.00 got you the radio with the home and car kit.
The major deal about the Replay is that you can pause, rewind and forward (once you have something in memory) a live broadcast. Kind of like a TiVo / DVR. This is great when you are listening to a cool song and want to hear it again, or when you get interrupted in the middle of a show and don’t want to miss a thing. And since the title/artist of a song/show are stored, you can actually pick from a menu the last 45 mins worth of programming. On the downside (and this applies to live programming with a TiVo as well), when you flip a channel, you loose the recorded stuff.
A feature that isn’t mentioned much - but I thought it was also pretty awesome - was that you can store the name of your favourite artists, songs or sports team. When one of those favourites come on (or a game is about to start), then you are notified about it and have the option to change channel and listen to it. You can store up to 20 songs/artists and 1 favourite sports team (if they increase this number to 2 NFL, 2 college football, 2 MLB and 2 NBA we are rockin’!).
The screen is clean and clear, it has a blue back-light LCD display that you can adjust brightness and contrast to. It’s big enough to hold the current channel number, name, artist/song, category, time, band and signal strength. All without crowding the area.
I found it pretty interesting that you can view the signal strength of the satellite and terrestrial reception. Usually if you are at less than 30% for both, you are out of coverage.
There are 30 slots for memory presets, divided into 3 bands. But I found that I rarely use that, since it’s easier to enter the channel number directly or search by broadcast category.
On the downside (and this may not affect everybody), the buttons are a bit small. My clunky fat fingers have issues with the buttons on the actual device, but the remote saves the day, it’s so well done and comfortable that I use it all the time, in the car, office and home.
Since I got the home kit, I have to throw in that the desk stand is very stylish and actually looks nice on a desk with the radio. So far I’m happy with the purchase and it’ll probably stay that way until the Stiletto comes out.