Roberts Adds a CD Player to Its Radios: the Revere 300 and 500 Launch at £399.99 and £599.99

Roberts Radio has launched Revere, a three-strong family of all-in-one stereo systems that puts a CD drive back into the middle of a British radio brand's line-up. Announced on 24 September 2026, the range runs from £249.99 to £599.99 and spans radio-and-Bluetooth simplicity at one end to Wi-Fi streaming with a disc tray at the other.

All three share the same basic recipe: a hand-built wooden cabinet that Roberts describes as acoustically tuned, finished in black leathercloth, with a full-colour display, controls arranged across the top, and speakers firing both forwards and backwards. DAB, DAB+ and FM radio are standard across the range, as is Bluetooth streaming. Roberts' own framing for the range, as reported by What Hi-Fi?, is that it brings together the tangibility of CD and radio with the convenience of Bluetooth and modern streaming — the physical-media ritual and the phone-in-pocket habit in one box.

Revere 100 — £249.99

The entry model is the only one of the three without a disc drive, so it is worth saying plainly: the Revere 100 does not play CDs. It is a DAB/DAB+/FM and Bluetooth unit with 20 radio presets, a set of EQ presets plus a user-adjustable "My EQ" mode, and a sleep timer, according to the specification published by French retailer Cobra.

Driver complement is two 2.25-inch full-range units working with a 5.25-inch passive bass radiator, as listed by Wallpaper* — Cobra quotes the same drivers in metric as 5.7cm and 13.3cm. A passive radiator is a common way of getting low-frequency extension out of a small sealed-ish enclosure without the port noise a very short tube can produce, and it fits the cabinet size Roberts is working with here.

Revere 300 — £399.99

The middle model is where the CD player appears. Alongside the disc drive, the Revere 300 adds USB playback from a connected device, smartphone charging over USB, and a remote control — none of which the 100 offers. The speaker arrangement changes too: two 3-inch full-range drivers (7.6cm in Cobra's listing) with rear-ported bass loading rather than a passive radiator.

That £150 step between the 100 and the 300 buys the physical-media half of the pitch, and it is the model that most directly answers the question this launch is built around — whether a mainstream radio brand can sell a CD player again in 2026.

Revere 500 — £599.99

The flagship keeps everything in the 300 and adds network audio. That means Wi-Fi for internet radio and podcasts, Spotify Connect, Deezer, app control — Cobra names the Oktiv app — and an Ethernet socket for anyone who would rather not trust the wireless. Wallpaper* describes the Spotify Connect implementation as hi-res; Cobra's listing refers to Spotify Connect with Lossless. The two descriptions point the same direction, but the precise technical detail is worth treating as unsettled until Roberts publishes more.

The 500 also gains sound-profile adjustment, which Cobra details as four location-based profiles — the sort of setting that compensates for a unit pushed into a bookshelf or backed against a wall. Cobra's spec sheet also lists 120 radio presets and 18 streaming presets, a jump from the 20 presets on the 100.

Acoustically it is the most ambitious of the three, with four drivers rather than two: a pair of 2.5-inch full-range units (6.3cm) alongside a pair of 3.5-inch woofers (8.9cm). That is the only model in the range with dedicated bass drivers rather than full-range units doing the whole job.

What Roberts is not saying yet

Several things you might expect from a launch of this kind have not been published. No source has given power output in watts, cabinet dimensions or weight. Nor has Roberts stated a Bluetooth version or which codecs the range supports, so aptX, LDAC and AAC are all open questions. An aux input and a headphone output appear in one specification listing we have seen but nowhere else, and we are treating them as unconfirmed rather than repeating them as fact.

The CD context

Roberts has timed this deliberately. Published alongside the launch, Wallpaper* cited UK CD sales up 10% year on year and a 96% rise in CD player searches at John Lewis. Those are figures reported around the announcement rather than independently verified market data, and they arrive with the usual caveat that a percentage rise says nothing about the size of the base it rose from. Still, they explain the shape of the range: two of the three models have a tray, and the cheapest one is positioned as the radio you buy when you genuinely do not want one.

Roberts CEO Owen Watters, quoted in the launch coverage, called Revere a clear step-up in the company's sound-system line. That is the manufacturer's own characterisation, and nobody has yet heard these units under controlled conditions and published a verdict — this is a launch report, not a review, and there is no listening judgement to be had from a spec sheet.

What is clear is the pattern. Revere lands in a year that has seen several mainstream brands quietly reintroduce disc drives into one-box systems, and it does so with the disc tray treated as a headline feature rather than a legacy hangover. Whether that is nostalgia, a genuine shift in buying habits, or simply a feature that costs little to include and photographs well, the range is out in the UK now; Cobra lists French availability as late September.

This article was written by an AI system from Into The HiFi AI Desk, generated from the following sources, with no human editing pass before publication: Wallpaper* — Roberts launches the Revere family of all-in-one audio players, What Hi-Fi? — Roberts' new collection of all-in-one stereo systems, Trusted Reviews — Roberts Radio's new Revere range arrives in time for CD renaissance, Cobra — Roberts Revere : trois systèmes tout-en-un CD, DAB et Bluetooth.