Light weight, no skipping

Very quiet - even cracked up to full volume, no restart
you stopped facility

Bought the soley for use when running, but it is so quiet it get drowned out everytime a car passes!

Tried using differnt headphones as suggested in other reviews, but then couldn't hear anything at all!

Otherwise good if limited but the lack of oomph really lets it down.

Also annoying is that when you swith it off it goes back to the start when you start playing again rather than picking up where you left off.

My minidisc player is much better in all respect except its
heavier and skips when I run.

Similar Products Used:

Sharp Minidisc

portability, size,clarity, ease of use

poor customer support

When I purchased my Rio MP3, I loved it. It is so convenient and small. The sound is terrific. However, I had a problem with the player skipping. I called the customer service number and was put into an automated system which kept me from ever talking to a human. I finally talked to a person and they told me to buy a new battery. This didn't fix the problem. They should have just offered to repair the unit. Now my player is sitting in a drawer when I could be enjoying it. Not good!

no skipping

sound quality

i owned a rio for a only a couple of days before i returned it because of its horrible sound and lack of bass. if you want good digital recorder buy a minidisc both sony and sharp make minidiscs that are way better sounding than the rio and the discs are about $2.50 not $99

Skip-free listening, near digital quality, easy upload/download from PC

Slow transfer from PC to Rio, No equalization

Nice unit but slight over-priced. Should have more onboard memory. As it is, the Rio will hold about 8-10 4 minute songs sampled at 128k.

The transfer from the PC to the Rio is really quite slow. I usually use the Rio when I jog and don't think of it until I am ready to walk out the door...then about 15 minutes later, I am ready to leave with a new set of songs in the unit.

Skip-free music is really nice...not funbling with cassettes and CDs is nice. I would recommend jumping on the MP3 bandwagon but not necessarily the Rio wagon.

Ditto the previous review, I love mine too, with two caveats:
Add 20 stars for ability to load free music from the internet.
Subtract 15 stars for meager 32 MB capacity, which yields only 30 mins or 7-8 songs on the onboard memory at the high (near-CD) quality 128kb/s data density. I hope that computer memory capacity technology continues to increase so that the additional storage cards could yield say... 64-128 MB. Now that would be something - two 1/2 hours stored on board. Alternately, someone should invent something that will autoload MP3's from a zip disk/drive, without a computer.

I have been into high end playback equipment for a long time now (pushing 20 yrs...) I've owned Maggies, Ohm, Mirage, Apogee, Spica, and currently Martin Logan reQuests. And a whole slew of source and amplification equipment. I currently have a dedicated listening room (25 x 25) with a cathedral ceiling and I listen to music nearly every night. My point is, I care about good sound reproduction and I beleive I have a reasonably firm grasp of what high fidelity is all about... if I had to boil it all down to a one liner, it would basically be: A system that can virtually disappear leaving you with nothing but the music as it was intended to be heard/experienced. I'm sure there's a very long line of folks who would love to argue that point... but that's the way I see it.
Having said all that, I have been waiting for a LONG time now for someone to come out with a product like the RIO. A no-moving-parts, decent playback quality device with relatively easy/painless tune management. So, here it is... at long last. Something that has decent sound quality and is basically bullet-proof for on-the-go listening. I went out just yesterday to the local Best Buy and slapped down my 0.2 Kbucks with fairly high anticipation.

Well to make a long (and potentially very boring) story short and sweet, I used the MusicMatch s/w to convert some of my fav CD tracks into MP3. I chose a bit rate of 128K which allowed me to stick 7 standard length tracks (4 minutes or so) into the on-board 32M flash RAM. I slipped the included in-ear phones on and depressed the play button.

I am very, very, very pleased with the results. I do not expect playback from a lossy compression scheme to sound perfect... and it certainly does not sound perfect. But it is much better than I had anticipated. Transients are there, reasonably low noise floor, plenty of top end... bass did seem a bit lacking though (even after selecting the 'Rock' EQ setting which seems to bring the lows up a notch or two (to quote Emeril)... perhaps just a better set of headphones would help to mitigate the bass shyness a bit. But all-in-all, a great little piece of gear that weighs next to nothing, lasts 12 hrs on a single AA, and can't skip a beat during playback regardless of how hard you try.

I'm keeping it!

Here's how I would rate it:

Price - 4 stars (it really shouldn't cost 2X that of a good portable CD player)
Sound - 4 stars (keeping in mind that compression ain't perfect)
Ease of use - 5 stars
Portability - 5 stars
Coolness factor - 10 stars!

The sound rating may bump up to 4.5 stars once I play with higher bit-rate playback options... who knows.

So go try it out, it's da' balls.

-TSV

No skipping, Very Clear Sound

Definitely needs more bass, even with good headphones. Also, certain frequencies, like clapping in a song, are way to loud, much louder than the voice or the music.

I think an mp3 player is invaluable because there's never a need to buy 17 dollar cd's everytime you want one song on it. Also, it never skips and fits into your pocket. I just think though that it could use more bass, cause when i download mp3's onto my computer, they have lots of bass, but that player has almost none.

expandability
sound quality
power usage

battery can shake and rio can turn off (I stuck a dime in it)
slow connection
no song identification

I had a rio 300 for about 3 days but it was stolen by a moron who didn't realize that a connection cable is required for songs to be added or deleted. I would recommend this to person who wants a small, portable device to play a few songs when needed. This is not recommended for a person who listens to music for 4 hours a day. The only problem was that the battery would shake and lose contact, which made the rio shut off. I fixed this by putting a dime in the battery slot (it kinda stuck out). I don't know what else I have to say.

Similar Products Used:

rio 500

I bought the upgrable 32meg card,perfect for almost the same or a little more of a full cd.

Took about an hour to correct the settings in BIOS in order for the software to work so i could transfer files.

No complaints regarding the Bass output whatsoever.Have a very good sound card and the sound output also depends on how well the MP3 was also.I have a great car stereo and for a portable player this unit is great and not costly like other models which leaves lots of room for upgrading!!!No problems with the transferring either,I have a fast hard drive which saeems to make the difference.

Owned every portable audio device on the face of the earth, and this is the only device that 3 months after I bought it I still use it religiously and love to see how much more I can cram in to memory before the music sounds like mud.
The software to encode CD Audio is a bit slow though.

Give it a try, after all its fun.