Philips AVENT Audio Baby Monitor Dect SCD502/10

We went through I don't know... 4 or 5 baby monitors before finding this one. At this point, I don't know if you're going to get a perfect product but for us this one is darn near close.A little background:We had twin boys in December of 2014 -- they were premmie and if you've ever dealt with a premmie you know you're not doing a lot of sleeping... partially because you're scared to death they're going to stop breathing at any moment(but usually while you're trying to sleep) and partially because they're noisy little suckers -- it's like tending to baby goats. We had an additional problem in that the range of the video monitor that we used with our daughter would not reach to our bedroom so we had to come up with another solution. We finally settled on, after much discussion about Russians watching our babies sleep(conclusion, who cares) a Dropcam(now Nest) coupled with an audio monitor might work -- I bought the Safety 1st Baby monitor which worked most of the time, but it also sent over a lot of static and if you left it on too long it would freak out -- it finally broke after a year(it's a good thing because I had developed a strong hate for it) We then tried several more, most of them did not work because of range -- the ones that did were noisier than our baby goats--The Philips Avent DECT baby monitor was the hail mary toss in baby monitors -- turns out it had no problem with the range AND the big winner is.. if there's no noise, it doesn't make any noise -- AHHHHH, at least for some of the night I now have peace and quiet instead of listening to their rain machine and static all night long -- it has a built in noise gate, which is triggered when ambient noise rises beyond a certain point and it's quite sensitive. We actually place the monitor outside of their door. The first few nights of using it, I was afraid it would not respond if the babies make noise, but it does... every time...I sat there with dropcam(which has a slight delay) and the monitor one night and it didn't miss one baby sound-- I completely trust it now and our quality of sleep has improved dramatically -- I highly recommend this monitor-- Oh and it works with 220v as well, we took it to Germany, yeah ...twin babies in Germany, I don't know what we were thinking....

I love this system. We've been using it for about 7 months now and it's ABSOLUTELY THE BEES KNEES.Other reviews commented on how it feels a bit too light weight--as in "not quality"--and I bought this expecting to agree with them and not like this detail. However, this monitor surprised me in that it's buid quality is good (and has survived my 4.5 year old throwing it) and the lightweight aspect is much more of a good thing then a bad one: I throw it in my back jeans pocket all the time and can get work done.Range is excellent. I can work in my large yard or basement with the baby asleep on the second story.User interface is brilliantly simple.Two downsides of this otherwise stellar product (that I highly recommend and am glad I purchased): 1) it does eat AA batteries at a good rate (however I should note that I use it a LOT and all of my AA batteries are used from a project I did that basically gave me a lifetime supply of AA batteries, don't ask...so take this comment with a huge grain of salt) and 2) should you forget to plug this in the wall at night and your batteries run out you'll get woken by a dreadful low battery chirp that drives my wife batty. Phillips: are you guys reading this? If you are then please consider replacing the low battery chirp to a light that comes on. The chirp is annoying.However, I'm a SUPER PICKY person. Pay no attention to these gripes. Buy this monitor. I love it.Only complaint is

This monitor does a great job. The baby room unit is wired to the power outlet. The remote unit can be run by batteries or by a power cord. We use ours with 2x Amazon-branded rechargeable AA batteries. It requires two AA batteries. The unit will NOT recharge your batteries for you, even if you plug it in. You'll need to use a standard battery charger to recharge the batteries, if you're using rechargeables. It doesn't come with batteries, so you'll need to supply your own.Important Note: it will sound like it's cutting out once in a while, or often. It isn't. It tries to save battery power by only transmitting sound when there's something to send. If the room is very quiet, it won't send any audio at all. If you have a fan running in the background, you'll sometimes hear it and sometimes you won't. This is NOT a problem. It will transmit audio EVERY TIME your baby is making noise.We're in a neighborhood with a lot of WiFi traffic, but not a lot of houses. We have had no noticed interference issues with this monitor set.Also, supposedly the audio is encrypted. This was a requirement for us. I don't notice any lag in audio, though it does take about three seconds for the units to negotiate a conversation before audio starts streaming.These provide only one-way audio. The remote unit does not have any means of sending audio to the baby room unit.