Compact and fashionably chic..this baby rocks!
Written: Apr 16 '01 (Updated Apr 16 '01)
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Pros: sleek ultra-portable design, music anti-skip buffer, good battery life
Cons: comes shipped with lousy earplugs, takes too much time to initialize
The Bottom Line: Priced at $169, the Rio Volt without a doubt is the best bang for the buck on the MP3 market today.
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| 1GQ's Full Review: Rio Volt SP100 Personal CD Player |
I've been in the market for a portable MP3 player for sometime now, but until recently there weren't any products out that really caught my attention. I really fancied the Sony Music Clip, but its proprietary OpenMG system just killed it. The Creative Labs Nomad II MG was another strong candidate, but it's use of SmartMedia storage cards immediately knocked it off my list. The Sonicblue Rio Volt MP3/CD player was a much larger device than what I was originally looking for, but after playing around with it for a week...it turned out to be the perfect choice for me.
What really impresses me about the RioVolt is its amazing flexibility. It reads from mastered CDs, CD-Rs, and CD-RWs. It can play standard CD Audio, MP3, Microsoft WMA, and Real Audio. This means that I can play my regular music CDs and home made mp3 CD-Rs. Image 708MB worth of MP3s on a single CD-R!
Money wise, CD-R media is far and away cheaper than traditional MP3 player medias like CompactFlash or Smartmedia which go for an average of $99 for 32MB versus $0.32 for a single 700MB CD-R. The RioVolt is also on average $40 cheaper than traditional MP3 players too.
The RioVolt is also equipped with a music skip buffer, you can make it skip but in general it works very well. I also impressed by the very useful eight function remote which by the way did not have any earplugs "fixed" to it. This means you can plug in your own earplugs, thats a good thing cause I really like my Bang & Olfsen earplugs :-) and the Rio earplugs that come with it suck anyway.
On the downside, although its quite compact and fashionably chic compared to CD walkmans, its still significantly larger than your traditional MP3 player, almost three times the size of the most compact models.
I should also point out that the Rio Volt creates a table of contents when you turn on the player, this can take anywhere from 20 seconds to 3 minutes depending on the complexity of your CD-Rs directory structure. My recommendation is leave everything on the root; I tried organizing 670mb worth of MP3s into 5 directories and it took the Rio 3 minutes to complete the boot sequence! With all the MP3s in the root, it takes roughly 52 seconds.
There are a couple of other quirks too...the battery door is kinda flimsy and can accidently open with the slightest touch...also because the jog control (activates the player) is on the face of the player...it can be turned on accidently (eating battery power) especially when using the included carry case since you can't see the LCD to know if its on or off.
In conclusion, the RioVolt is a great buy today at $169...when all costs are considered and the amazing flexibility of the player...theres just no competition.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 169
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Epinions.com ID:
1GQ
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Location: Miami
Reviews written: 60
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