BIG on promises, SMALL on performance
Written: May 19 '00
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Product Rating:
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Pros: excellent idea, small, easy to use, great user interface, long battery life, equalizer control
Cons: clumsy setup, must use RealAudio, cumbersome and inconvenient hardware setup, car performance EXTREMELY poor
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| bassist695's Full Review: RCA Lyra RD2204 (64 MB) MP3 Player |
A few months ago my friend purchased this Digital Player from RCA. I tried this thing out, the Lyra they call it. Interesting, I thought.
Now I love music, in fact I love it so much, that if it doesn't sound as good as it should I get mad, maybe even violent.
So, since my birthday was so very recent, I asked for it. Well, I got it. At first, I tested it out, put a few tracks on the 64MB memory card, which is very good, I could fit a full CD on there. It's not as good as 74 minutes on a standard CD-R, but it's good enough that I don't have to waste a CD everytime I want some new portable music.
I plugged my favorite headphones into my new gadget and took a listen. "Wow it sounds really good!", thought I. Lo and behold, it came with a car attachment. Let me tell you, I was so close to utter happiness that I started to think I passed through the Pearly Gates and didn't even know it, I mean, with the Lyra, you have the ability to:
1) Listen to new music whenever and wherever with a very small and convenient player, unlike cumbersome and clumsy CD players. I don't even have to waste money on CDs or CD-Rs!
2) Operate a very friendly user interface with complete words and phrases & titles so you know exactly how your music will be arranged and played!
3) Never get tired of your music! I have a 1000+ MP3 collection on my computer, so I could realistically never get bored with this 'lil gadget and fill it with different songs all the time. What a concept!
On the other hand, when I actually got to use this thing hard-core, disappointment set in, along with a headache when I realized how much this thing cost, only to deliver so little. I thought so for the following reasons:
1) The hookup to the PC is very awkward. You have to hook up the Lyra to a serial port and share it with your printer. Not a big deal for most, but if you have a serial scanner, as I do, you will have big problems. What happens is, your 3 devices that are shared on the one serial port all conflict, so your PC freezes, and you have to reboot in order to thaw it out. Quite inconvenient. Also, for some very strange and unjustifiable reason, you have to also plug it into your keyboard! I thought this extremely strange, what were they doing with my keyboard input, do they have access to what I type when I use the memory card or when I connect to services to upgrade RealPlayer? Hesitant, I still used it as recommended...
2) You must use the new RealPlayer. I don't like RealPlayer, and in order to simplify the Lyra's use, I had to use the Lyra to transport files to the memory card. You can also just employ the good old drag-and-drop method and drop files from Windows Explorer into RealPlayer in order to put the songs onto the memory card. I chose this method since RealPlayer is very cumbersome in this regard, it is very slow in terms of finding MP3s, and distinguishing them from playlists. This quickly became irritating and slow.
3) In-car performance is very poor. My willingness to look past petty weaknesses were squashed when this didn't pull through for me as it should have. When I use my home-made CDs in the car, they sound as good as the MP3s did on my PC, but once I played the music through my Lyra in the car, you could hear the weak tracks, the sloppy and scratchy sounding audio, and the weakened bass. There is no "Audio Out" track as there are on portable CD players, but you use the headphone jack, which I thought odd. You also must put the volume on the Lyra all the way up in order to hear the music very well, and if you forget, well, you'll get quite the rude awakening later on. Unlike listening to music on your computer, you could really hear the difference between 96K and 128K tracks in the car. This whole issue is a puzzle to me, and I decided it wasn't worth solving.
LowDown
When I think Lyra, I think disappointment. It seems like a rushed excuse to get something onto the market as opposed to a solid thorough item which will please people as they undoubtedly get their money's worth. This thing cost almost $200 with the warranty, hardly worth the lack of performance and aggravation that I experienced with the Lyra. Ok, maybe I'm a bit harsh, but I believe that any discerning music lover who also loves convenience would expect more from an item which could have helped RCA profit so strongly in this new age of Digital Music.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
bassist695
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Location: Hartford, CT
Reviews written: 83
Trusted by: 25 members
About Me:
Newly graduated and not jobless, yet life could be better!
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