Sit down and rotate Wild Dog of the North!
Written: Jun 02 '00 (Updated Jul 31 '01)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Easy to use, extremely easy, great sound, 5 band equalizer, backlight is awesome
Cons: No hold switch, RealJukebox is not cool, memory card has problems
The Bottom Line: A nice, old player! Hehe, it's outdated by now, but can still deliver a good punt in the MP3 Super Bowl.
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| Biggs219's Full Review: RCA Lyra RD2204 (64 MB) MP3 Player |
(Here she is, my update of the RCA Lyra Player)
Ah yes, this little sucker has been outdated for a LONG time now. But, hey, why not fix my review anyway!?
The RCA Lyra, one of the pioneering and most well known MP3 players there was. It has it cons, it's pros, and it's Bris. Don't know what Bris are? Short for Brian... common, you got it!
The Player:
I love this little guy. It looks really nice, has a good feel, and so far has run flawlessly. The size is just right, weight is very good, blah blah blah! You get the picture?
The player has six main buttons and a jog wheel. There's a play/pause/on button, a stop/off button, two skip/search buttons, mode button (for playing mode; repeat, random, etc.), a DSP button (for equalizer setting Digital Sound Processor), and a button to activate the backlight for 5 seconds. The jog wheel is used for three main objectives. One: while a song is playing, volume control. Two: In Stop mode, while looking at the playlist, you can move up and down to select a certain song, and three: to select a song for the custom playlist feature. Headphones jack is located on top left, on the left side is an AC adaptor input. On the backside, there is a removable belt clip, a very sturdy one at that, the area to insert the Compactflash card, and a simple eject slide-switch to remove the disk. There's also a battery cover on the bottom in the back.
Features:
As I said, this player does have DSP settings, a backlight (pretty turquoise), various mode setting, and playlist feature. It does have the belt clip included, I was surprised at how durable and efficient this clip is, it holds very tightly. The screen itself will display the ID tags for MP3s, it shows title, artist, and album. However, there is only room for 16 characters (including spaces) and the Lyra has no word wrap or scrolling.
The good!
The Lyra is easy to work, fun to play with, has very nice quality sound, and is overall a good player for it's time. The Flash card included is a 32 MB, the car kit package includes a 64 MB card. That's enough for a decent amount of music. The menus are easy to work with using the jog wheel, and it becomes quite natural within a couple hours. The included headphones aren't bad at all either. In fact I use them with other equipment quite often. Battery life exceeds ten hours for me, I get around 12, but no less than 11. It runs off two double-A batteries.
The bad!
The Lyra has no hold switch and these buttons are easy to accidentally hit. I have been angered off countless time because I'll be running along, accidentally bump it and my music shuts off. Other than that, the player is fine itself.
RealJukebox is a joke. I absolutely hate it sometimes. it never loads, it won't find songs, tag editing is exceedingly difficult at best, it's just no good. There's another reason I don't like this player which I'll discuss later.
The memory card also has had frequent problems. Occasionally it simply won't let me touch anything on the disk, can't add, can't delete, etc. You have to download a special format patch on the Lyra website to have it work again.
These problems are very small in the long run, and the bugs have been worked out in later players, but this one still had the problems.
ARGH!
Okay, I'll be honest and say due to some VERY POOR decisions, I hate this player occasionally. It has been created with a special process, songs MUST be transferred via a program (RealJukebox) where the file is saves as an MPX file. This is a special encoding so ONLY the Lyra can read it, it also means the songs can't be shared with others as you simply download a *.mpx file from the disk. This also means the Lyra has a huge lag between song loads. My Iomega runs by reading info off a moving disk, and it's faster than this. This decision was worthless and I am very much against it, bad choice RCA, BAD choice.
I realize this review is short, however, the Lyra has been replaced by it's own company, starting the Lyra 2, which I hear is worse than this one. This one is simply obsolete and needs no long 10 page review. All in all, despite some bad 'enhancements', this is a fairly nice player. I give it three out of five due to these problems, but it's hard not to give four. If you're not that interested in MP3s and just want a simple little gadget to try them (MP3s) out, go find an RCA Lyra for a cheap price, they're outdated, but still very useful for a little casual MP3 playback.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
Biggs219
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Member: Brian
Location: St. Paul, MN
Reviews written: 24
Trusted by: 33 members
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