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Posted by Julio
Franco on November 27, 2000
Company: Sonic
Blue/Diamond Product: Rio
500 MP3 player
Features
As we already mentioned, the Rio 500 comes with 64mb
on-board memory, which I believe is the minimum you’ll want
to have on a MP3 player like this. Anyway the Rio has an
expansion slot where you can put a removable SmartMedia card
ranging from 16 to 64mb, they’re on the pricey side of
things though, you know.
Thanks to usage of this type of memory the Rio, like any
other conventional portable MP3 player, features a skip-free
design with no moving parts on it. Unlike previous models, the
Rio 500 connects to your computer via a USB port, that
translates on very fast transferring times, in fact, you can
fulfill the 64mb in just a couple of minutes. Additionally the
package contains an optional carrying case, a pair Koss
headphones (we’ll talk about those later) and software
support for Windows and Macintosh based machines.
The Rio 500 uses a single AA battery, which supposedly lasts
13 hours of continuous playback. I was a bit skeptical about
these claims however once I started using the player I noticed
that Diamond was right about the battery life that is, if you
have the backlight turned off. The backlight consumes a lot of
battery so I’d say that under normal usage conditions
(w/backlight turned on) the battery could last between 8-10
hours.
On the bad side of the Rio 500, we have the horrible Koss
headphones that come bundled with it, although sound quality
wasn’t bad and they were comfortable, they lacked some bass
output, the foam that covers them used to drop easily after 3
days of using the player. Last but not least, the power of the
output was very low; if you were on a noisy place it’d be
improbable that you will be able to listen more comfortably
with this headphones that Diamond supplied, making the Rio
look underpowered, when that’s not the case at all.
I thought that testing the Rio 500 with the
included Koss headphones would have made no justice for it so
I decided to use a pair of Sony headphones that I’ve used
with my Discman for a long time now, this change resulted in a
major improvement in audio quality, better bass was noticed,
not to mention that volume was given a major boost.
Key Features
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Play up to two hours of digital-quality music from the
Internet or your CDs
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Easily upgradeable to future audio formats
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Lightweight and skip-free - no moving parts
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PC and Macintosh compatible
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USB connection for blazing fast downloads
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Increase
memory by adding SmartMedia cards
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