The King is Dead! Long Live the Rio Volt!
Written: Jun 04 '01 (Updated Jul 03 '01)
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Pros: Inline remote, good EPS (anti-shock) times, upgradeable firmware
Cons: Clumsy song search features, EPS no longer the best in the business
The Bottom Line: With newer MP3-CD players on the market, the Rio Volt is showing its age, and no amount of firmware upgrading can mask that.
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| gorocco's Full Review: Rio Volt SP100 Personal CD Player |
When it comes to MP3-CD players, SonicBlue's Rio Volt reigns as king of the hill. Now, with TDK entering the field with their impressive Mojo Digital Jukebox unit, does the Rio Volt still stand tall?
I am writing this review based on my brother's Rio Volt (hey, when the cat is away, the mice will play). After discussing the Rio Volt, I will make some comparisons to the TDK's Mojo unit.
Design and Included Goodies
The Rio Volt is shaped your average portable CD player. It is about as thick as the average priced Sony Discman units. The unit is a base blue color with a silver cover. The plastic shell feels lightweight and relatively flimsy. Although my brother's Rio Volt has gone through much wear and tear, the unit itself looks almost like it was brand new and plays just as if it were.
The top of the unit is decorated with an assortment of buttons, including a +10 button (to skip 10 tracks at a time), a mode button, and an equalizer (EQ) button. In addition to the usual play, stop, and volume buttons, the unit haas a joypad used to navigate through the unit's menus, to power the unit on/off, and to play and stop music. The unit opens by sliding a latch at the base of the unit.
A two-line LCD sits in the middle of the unit. It has a blue backlight that turns on when you press a button and turns off after a second or two. The LCD shows the track, time, and name of the song if the MP3 file is tagged.
With your Rio Volt, you also get headphones, AC wall adapter, two Duracell AA batteries, a thin leather case. Since the case is specially designed for the Volt, it fits the unit very nicely and has access holes to reach the necessary ports (headphones, etc.).
You also get an inline remote. The remote plugs into the headphones jack, and then you can insert the headphones into the remote. The remote is small, but it is capable of performing all of the necessary functions of the Volt's main control panel, eliminating the need to fumble with your Rio Volt (which should be nicely tucked away in its case). It features a joypad designed like that on the unit and 3 buttons for volume and EQ adjustments.
Rounding out the package are two CDs worth of software. You get Adaptec's Easy CD creator 4 software, Real Jukebox, SoundJam, and the Rio Volt User Manual with Adobe Acrobat. Seeing that I already had MP3-CDs lying around, I did not play with the software much.
Features
The Rio Volt plays both CD-Rs and CD-RWs encoded with MP3 and WMA files, giving you well over 600 minutes of music per disc. With a fresh set of batteries, the Rio Volt cranks out close to 14 hours of nonstop music (with 10 sec ESP/no ESP for Audio CD/MP3). With the 40 sec/120 sec EPS (Audio CD/MP3), the unit gives out a good 10 hours or so of music. The unit is advertised to give up to 15 hours of music under optimal conditions.
Using the mode button, you can opt to repeat 1 song, repeat all songs in a directory, repeat all songs on the CD, shuffle, repeat a random song, randomly select directories, or randomly play all songs. The search functions are nice, but finding songs can be tedious since the LCD can only show two lines at a time. You can program playlists into the Volt, but they only last as long as your batteries.
The unit lets you select from four EQ settings: Normal, Jazz, Classical, and Ultra Bass. Unfortunately For the control freaks out there, you have to get the firmware upgrade to manually set the EQ.
Once you let the unit rip, it quickly loads your music to memory, powers down the CD spinner, and plays your song. The MP3 music quality is excellent. With properly encoded MP3 files, you can easily play CD quality music from the Rio Volt.
I mentioned above a bit about the firmware. The Rio Volt lets you upload the latest version of the firmware into the unit. Just download the files from the web site, burn it into a CD, and play the CD. That's it! While you sacrifice a CD-R for the firmware, the latest upgrade improves the unit's performance considerably. In addition to making the menus more user friendly, the latest update allows the unit to produce better anti-shock (less skips!) and reduces mechanical noise between songs. While the unit still skips occasionally with MP3 files (moreso with regular audio CDs), it is much less noticeable now!
The Showdown
The Rio Volt now faces heavy competition from TDK's Mojo MP3-CD player. With both units competitively priced, who will reign supreme?
When you get down to it, the most important factor is the music. Who performs better? In terms of quality, both players produce excellent music. I can't tell the two apart when the units are stationary. When you get them physically moving, differences start to appear. The Mojo, which has longer EPS times (40 sec/8 minutes EPS for audio CD/MP3), provides practically skip-free music with MP3 songs of 3-6 minutes in length. I experienced some skipping with the Rio Volt on the same MP3-CDs.
The big marketing gimmick of the Mojo is the user friendly search features, allowing you to sort your songs by artist, title, genre, or directory. The Mojo also remembers playlists from up to three CDs even after you change the batteries. While the Rio Volt has a nice search program with the latest firmware, it does not compare to the Mojo in terms of ease of use.
The biggest advantages for the Rio are that unlike the Mojo, it (1) supports the WMA format, and (2) has upgradeable firmware to improve performance.
Final Thoughts
Searching through www.TechBargains.com, I have found the Rio Volt for $131.95 and the Mojo for $139.95. Since both units match closely in price, I cannot recommend the Rio Volt with the new competition sitting right next to it. Don't get me wrong, the Rio Volt is an excellent MP3-CD player and has performed wonderfully to date. But it is showing its age, and no amount of firmware upgrading can mask that.
If you wish to read about a solid state MP3 player, cut and paste the following link to read my review of Creative Lab's Nomad II MG 64 Mb MP3 player:
http://gorocco.epinions.com/content_29698330244
Recommended:
No
Amount Paid (US$): 160
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gorocco
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Location: Stony Brook, NY
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