If RCA, Iomega, and Rio made a player...
Written: Apr 30 '01
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Pros: Best sound you'll find on an mp3 player.
Cons: fragile, poor OS, needs music-match to copy files, less than hip design
The Bottom Line: Excellent sound is a top priority in my books. It meets my criteria for sound, but comes up short in design, OS, media use, and construction.
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| mr_chupon99's Full Review: RCA Lyra RD2211 (64 MB) MP3 Player |
If RCA, Iomega, and Rio made a player; RCA doing the sound, Iomega (or creative labs) doing the storage (assume they get it right), and Rio doing the design, you would have the ultimate player. However, it doesn't exist and it never will. So from the above, you'll guess that this is the best player for sound quality.
Now when I saw sound quality, I don't mean that they included a nice pair of headphones (they included a decent pair of backphones, but they couldn't be worth more than 20 bucks). I mean that the player itself can dish out music that you can actually like - not tinny, not distorted. Just beautiful sound. Unlike all the other players out there, you get a 4 channel graphic equalizer to toy with (most offer just presets, while the rest give you bass/treble controls). The player will not distort, no matter how high you set the volume/bass level. And this player gets loud enough that ravers/heavy metal fans/people going deaf will refrain from listening at the max volume (which still sounds great)
Now the other reviewers complain that it eats up your battery in no time. This is understandable since the player makes no effort to conserve energy. The amp takes a lot of power to dish out this kind of sound. If you bought a Sony discman in the past year or two, you'll know what I'm talking about when I say "Tastes terrible, less filling" in regards to the sound/battery consumption on those units.
I should also point out that laker0924 (something like that) says that there isn't a hold button on the player. He accidently reviewed the 2204 unit (which is the original Lyra) in the Lyra2 area (the code for it is 2211, incidently). It does have a hold button, and I might as well add in it's other perks. It comes with a car kit, has an FM radio, decent backphones, clip-on remote, and a back-lit LCD.
Sound great? Now I tear it apart. The player needs a program called MusicMatch Jukebox to transfer files to the player. MusicMatch Jukebox sucks really hard. It's terrible. The interface is messy, it's slows down the entire computer, moves pretty slow on it's own, and generally annoys me. The CD install had an outdated version which crashed my machine every time I tried to boot it, but I'm smart and got a better version online (which doesn't crash, but still sucks). It's advertised that you get 64 megs to play with, but since the software for the player resides on the flash card, rather than built-in ROM, you lose 4 megs. What's worse is that when you copy your mp3s to the disk, it encodes them so it's a one way transfer. You cannot download music off of the disk if you wish to listen to it on the player. This is because RCA thought doing this would prevent you from spreading mp3s to everyone else in the world through a 64 meg flash card. Did they not hear of Napster/Gnutella/Burning CDs? If you want to give your mp3s to a friend via the flash card, you just copy the mp3s onto the card through your OS, instead of musicmatch. You won't be able to play them on the Lyra2, but it will store them as normal files and you can remove them. So RCA, what was the point?
The design of the player seems cheap, even ugly. I always feel like I'm going to break the eject button when I take out a card, and the overall feel is clumsy. For some reason, the unit has a place for an AC adapter, but they don't include on (so you must have a car cigerette lighter nearby if you wish to save on batteries cause it only comes with the car power adapter). The onboard OS doesn't make an effort to look nice, and cuts of names of long tracks. Plus the starting up loading time is annoying. And to top it all off, the belt clip for the Lyra2 is plastic, so don't expect it to survive anything other than walking/jogging.
So there you have it. Great sound. Cheap player. The cost is pretty sweet for a 64 meg unit with an FM player, equalizer, remote, car kit, and backphones, but it's so ironic that the best sounding player was made so badly. Perhaps the Intel Pocket Concert is the best choice for an MP3 player. I'll never know cause I can't get it where I live.
Recommended:
No
Amount Paid (US$): 250.00
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Epinions.com ID:
mr_chupon99
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Member: Adam Richards
Location: Toronto, Ontario
Reviews written: 57
Trusted by: 5 members
About Me:
Video game guru, and a loving sexy man for any women who needs one[wink].
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