The big question about Cambridge Soundworks' combination radio and CD player, the Radio CD 740, might be: Where do you put it?

The company might say it's suited for the living room, for "people who want spacious FM stereo sound . . . without the size or bother of a component stereo system." And yes, it does boom out a rich sound.

But when you combine its small package with its capabilities, you could easily conclude that its proper place is in the bedroom as one very sophisticated alarm clock, albeit an expensive one.

Like many clock radios, it has independent alarms for waking two people, but the 740 allows users not only to decide whether they want to awaken to tone, radio, or CD, but even to decide which CD track will most agreeably accomplish the task. Users can also set a volume to get up by, so they can slip into slumber with softly played classical music but arise with a blast of the blues.

Snooze time is also a variable that can be set from 5 to 22 minutes.

One of the device's neatest features is a two-line text-display window. Though it helps negotiate the radio's thicket of settings - bass, treble, and others - the best application is using the Radio Data Service, which allows broadcasters to send visual information along with the audio. Annoyingly, many stations put up only their slogan, which is selfish and not useful to listeners at all, but Magic 106.7, WBOS, and others identify what's playing or what's playing next.

The text window also operates while CDs are playing, whether they are commercial CDs or CD-ROM compilations of MP3s. It's more valuable with the latter, because you decide what information to include with the tracks that you select, while many commercial CDs were made without any text data at all.

CDs load with the same sort of motor mechanism that in-dash auto CD players use, one of several automotive-driven design tips incorporated into the 740.

Users can mark stations they go to often, and a "seek" function is supposed to map the radio landscape. My experience was that just as often, "seek" found only stations' neighborhoods, not the exact address: 1040 for WBZ 1030, 860 for WEEI 850, and 1520 for WBPS 1510.

One drawback it has as a clock radio is the 22 buttons and a dial on the face, which is pretty complicated for fumbling around in the dark. And that could have been avoided: Eight buttons are for station presets, which is absurdly optimistic for commercial radio, even in a big media market like Boston's. Who among us can find even four AM stations we want ready access to? Even more comical - no, delusional - is that the same buttons can access 16 FMs.

Sound quality, which of course has to be the first standard of any such product, is impressive, though that judgment arrives with the exception "for a device that size." Its 2.1 speaker array - the ".1" refers to a powered subwoofer that its engineers are very proud of - is very good, but it's hard to say that it compares with, say, a 5.1 setup such as those used in many living room systems today.

That may turn out to be the 740's biggest challenge in the marketplace. Compared with a full home sound system, it is great for its size, but not quite great. And versus nightstand competitors, it's practically unbeatable, but at $400, it ought to be.