sp90 / sp100
Written: Mar 02 '02
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Pros: good battery life, light weight, nice display
Cons: tech support, customer service, sonicblue in general is non-communicative.
The Bottom Line: Excellent inexpensive MP3 CD player.
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| agrajag's Full Review: Rio Volt SP100 Personal CD Player |
In light of all the other reviews, precious little needs to be added with respect to opinions about the sp90 / 100.
they're both about the same, except for case materials and feature set. I'll just refer to them both as "the player" from this point on.
However, I was looking for a player that could play audio books. Audio books require a player to resume to the previous exact position in any track, and the player does this flawlessly. The player can also playback 16kbps mp3's without any problems. In fact, with the 2.1 firmware, the player remembers the last TEN CD's exact resume position. That's a beautiful feature. I used 22khz sample rate and 16kbit / s MP3 encode rate, and the player didn't even blink, played them all without issue.
Some audio books can be quite lengthy. I converted one book, 365kbytes of text into 16kbit / s MP3 speech, and the filesize was about 35MB for 305minutes. The player played this, and was able to search through it very quickly (if you select the 6x scan speed) and remembered where I was exactly in the 'song' (book / story) even after powering the machine off and leaving it for hours. If the song is over 255 minutes, it shows the remainder FIRST, and then once the remainder of minutes has played, it shows the 255 minutes again (in remaining time mode, anyways) It's kind of confusing at first, but I guess they didn't think there'd be alot of 5 hours 'songs'. The time display only has three digit placeholders for minutes, so I guess this is better than nothing.
One thing, however. The current firmware cannot recognize more than 979 MP3 songs per CD, regardless of how many subdirectories are in use or how large or small the files are. So, given that, if you want ALOT of songs, there's no point in encoding them below 24kbit, as you'll exceed the number of songs per CD that can be read before you fill up the CD. As an example, at 16kbit / s I was able to write 1266 songs on one 700MB CD, but 287 of those are useless/inaccessible. Of course, it's a different story with e-books, because generally it's only one song per book, and they're hundreds of minutes long.
I've tried to get a list of the lowest possible bit rates for MP3 playback out of SonicBlue for all their current products, but after 2 weeks and 4 emails later, they still refuse to provide this information, saying only "our players can play 32-320kbit / s, and 16kbit / s is poor quality". Yeh, I know it's poor SAMPLING quality, but if you're generating it with a Natural Voices text-to-speech engine, the quality is actually quite good, even at 16kbit / s. The odd thing is, the documentation on their website shows the bit rates for some players, but not others? Not sure why there's inconsistency there, but it's annoying all the same.
Anyways, end of that story is SonicBlue is very hard to communicate with. VERY hard. I would hate to try and return my product, I'm sure it would be a nightmare in the making. Great products but their Customer Service sucks, in my opinion.
The other thing that isn't explained fully is the relationship between battery life and bit rate.
at 16kbit / s, the player spins up and reads the CD once every 12 minutes. at 128kbit / s, it does this once every 90 seconds. Basically what this boils down to is a 1440k buffer that's being used for the MP3 temp storage/playback. However, in firmware 2.10 (sp100) you can choose a 30 or 60 second MP3 buffer option (presumably this is at 128kbit?) but it says "the 60 second option reduces battery life". Uh... why? If it's reading ahead more of the song, it's obviously spinning up the CD less often... unless it's really the other way around, and it's spinning up the CD every 45 seconds instead of 90? But it isn't (just tested that), it spins up the CD exactly the same intervals, so ... huh? What the hell does this setting do, exactly?
Anyways, the spinning up of the CD for 'refreshes' of this temp MP3 storage playback RAM is really what extends the battery life of the product. Unless it uses more current to manipulate memory and decode MP3's than it does to spin the CD (which I find hard to believe). When the CD spinning is the only time the unit has a chance to skip. Therefore, if you use 16kbit / s MP3's (for example) you'll only get a CHANCE to skip once every 12 minutes. If you use 32kbit, it's once every 6 minutes, 64kbit, 3 minutes, 128kbit, 90 seconds.
There's tons of settings on this thing from EQ to shuffle mode to bass / treble boost to volume increment scale and on and on. Lots of virtual knobs to twiddle.
Great value for the money, in my opinion. Great of audio e-books, great for music. Not so great for regular CD's.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 90
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Epinions.com ID:
agrajag
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Reviews written: 1
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