Burn'em While You Can
Written: Apr 12 '01
|
Product Rating:
|
|
| Sound: |
 |
|
| Ease of Use: |
 |
|
| Durability: |
|
|
| Portability: |
|
|
| Battery Life: |
|
|
|
Pros: Hours and Hours of music. Catalogs categories of songs.
Cons: Expensive, tiny LCD display
The Bottom Line: If you have the cash, grab the Rio-Volt. It will provide over a dozen hours of un-interrupted music.
|
|
|
| infielderx's Full Review: Rio Volt SP100 Personal CD Player |
As Napster faces it's dying days, we of the mp3 ilk must quickly download and burn our favorite songs before there's nothing left to download but polka tunes from a starving musician in Akron. While a lot of us have been able to download hundreds of songs (especially those who live on a college campus with access to high-speed internet), most of us must race to download everything we want before it's too late. With the aid of the Rio-Volt MP3 player, we can take said mp3 files, put them on a CD-R, and go for that leisurely 15 hour walk that we've all been dying for, and never run out of music.
Resembling a space-age cd-walkman, the Rio-Volt not only plays mp3's files burned on to a CD-R, but it can also play back Windows Media Files, and standard cd's. While playing mp3 files, you'll notice your cd isn't even spinning. That's because with mp3 files, the Rio-Volt has a 120 second buffer; in essence, 2 minutes of the song is loaded into memory. This comes in handy; as of yet I haven't had one skip. For normal cd's, the buffer is 30 seconds.
You can expect around 15 hours of constant playback time with decent batteries. This is more than adequate for me, seeing as I have no use for listening to music for such long stretches of time. A forgotten humble perk of this as well is the fact that you don't have to cart around 5 to 10 cd's with you for a variety in music. One of my mp3 cd's has 166 songs on it. Imagine how many trips to the gym that would last you.
The LCD display on the Rio-Volt, while small, is still very useful. It displays ID3 tags which every mp3 file has (i.e."Detroit Rock City -Kiss), and you can even categorize them into different subgroups, like a file directory. Scanning through your collection of tunes on your cd is acceptably fast.
The headphones that come with the Rio-Volt are a bit skimpy; if you're going to spend this much money on an mp3 player, I'd get a decent set of earphones too.
If you're looking for the most well-rounded mp3 player out there, the Rio-Volt is your best bet.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 229
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
infielderx
|
|
Member: David Bragg
Location: Frederick, Md
Reviews written: 145
Trusted by: 24 members
About Me:
31 year old Pizza franchisee (what a mistake!) and computer geek.
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.