Diamond Rio 500 Rocks!
Written: Apr 23 '00
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Ultra-light, long battery life, USB interface, Windows 2000 and Macintosh Support
Cons: Needs more output power, earphones that come with it suck
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| MediaLabGuy's Full Review: Rio PMP-500 (64 MB) MP3 Player |
Bottom line: if weight, size, and power consumption is important to you, the Rio 500 should be your de facto choice of music players. However, if you perfer sound quality and need something with more storage capability, go with a minidisc player.
I just spent 2 weeks agonizing whether to buy a minidisc or a MP3 player, and I finally decided on the latter, and more specifically, the Rio 500 player from Diamond Multimedia. I took several things into consideration:
1. Weight and Size. I do a lot of running, and I don't want to have something bog me down. The Rio 500 is so light that I don't even notice that it's in my pocket. I borrowed a friend's Sony minidisc player and it was noticibly heavier, and noticibly bigger
2. Very low power consumption. The RIO runs off one AA battery and it lasts up to 10-12 hours. (Seriously...I ran it for 10 hours continuously off one battery!) Having no moving parts (unlike Minidisc players) really makes a difference. Plus, the Rio 500 won't ever skip because of this.
3. Sound Quality. The RIO 500 has the best sound quality of all the MP3 players on the market (95 dB signal to noise ratio). MiniDisc has better sound quality (stuff is recorded at 285 kBits/sec vs 128 kBits/sec for most MP3s on the rio), but it's also much heavier too.
The RIO 500 is a solid MP3 player, and RioPort just released the Windows 2000 drivers for it, so this is a big plus, as most other MP3 players do not have this support yet. My two gripes about the RIO is that the sound output levels seem to be really soft unless you use the RIO stock headphones (I used my sony street headphones and I could barely hear music at the loudest volume setting), and that 64 MB is at times a bit constraining, but other than that, I'm very pleased with my purchase.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
MediaLabGuy
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Member: Wesley Chan
Location: Cambridge, MA
Reviews written: 48
Trusted by: 29 members
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