[All] RioVolt Mini-Review (Long)
Red Chair
keep it. Decided to share some thoughts about it here.
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Physical
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1. Comes in plastic bubble package. I hate that stuff. Hard to open, and
I'm always worried I'll slice my fingers open. I know, poor me. :-P
2. Looks nice. Much less bulgy than it looks in pictures. Radius is 3/8"
greater than a standard CD. There's a little extra bulk around the hinge in
the back. The whole thing is 1 3/8" thick at its thickest point.
3. Feels fairly sturdy. The hinge seems to be a decent mechanism, front
latch is pretty good too.
4. Included remote is the size of a half-dollar coin (sorry monty). It is
_extremely_ light. A bit worried about sturdiness, but so far it works ok.
Has a clip on the back. I have somewhat smallish hands, and have a little
trouble working the remote. People with big hands might have bigger
problems. :-)
5. The remote provides headphone pass-through, and the unit has a separate
line-out socket as well.
6. An AC adapter (input: 120VAC 60Hz 12W output: 4.5VDC 600mA, tip
positive) is included.
7. Display has nice backlight. Resolution is really low, though, so while
everything on the screen is big and easy to read, not very much can be seen
without scrolling (which it does).
8. Included headphones are crap. No surprise. You should have your own
good set of headphones by now anyway.
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Audio
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1. Sounds great! It plays MP3 and WMA as advertised. I have not verified
the full range of bitrates, however. I have only tried 64k WMA, 128/160k
MP3.
2. Although the docs make no mention of it, it plays my VBR files encoded
with LAME just fine.
3. Headphone and line-out jacks have decent output levels. Nothing
egregiously low. Headphone volume goes from 0 to 20, and 10 is pretty good
volume already.
4. There are 5 preset EQ modes: Normal, Rock, Jazz, Classic, Ultra Bass.
There is no user-adjustable mode like on the Nomad II MG.
5. There's an A-B repeat function.
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Startup
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1. The basic idea here is that navigation is done using directory and file
names, and ID3 tags are used only to display info when a song is already
loaded and playing.
2. I used a 597MB, 111 song, 20 directory CD-R for this test. From
power-off to the instant the first song started playing, 25 seconds elapsed.
The startup time is less when there are fewer songs on the CD-R.
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Navigation
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1. Start the player with a CD-R in it, and it will just start playing the
songs in CD layout order. If you hit the "Navi" button at any point, the
display lists the directories on the CD. You use the joypad on the unit or
remote to move around. You go up/down (play/stop) to select a directory,
left (rw) to back out of a directory, and right (ff) to go into a directory.
Pretty intuitive, and very smooth. There's no delay during navigation. I
guess the unit loads all the directory and filename information on spin-up
and then caches it.
2. In "Navi" mode, it will display directory names and song names using
filenames. When you start playing a song, it will load the ID3 tag and then
display using that during the duration of the song. Now, I name my MP3
files like this "Artist - Album - Tracknum - Title.mp3". This doesn't work
so well for Navi mode. In the track list for one directory, all I can see
is the Artist. I have to wait a sec for it to scroll the whole title to see
what track I'm on. So, the best way to organize and name your files for the
Volt is to name them by track title, and group them in directories named by
artist and album.
3. One thing to note is that the Volt flattens your directory structure to
one level deep. So, say you have an artist directory with three album
directories in it. In "Navi" mode, you'll see the artist directory and all
three album directories directly under the root directory. The artist
directory is empty (unless there were song files in it), and the album
directories have the songs in them. So, basically it is pointless to have
more than one level of directories because everything but the leaf nodes
will be empty.
4. The Volt has a memory buffer, so it'll spin-up to load a song into
memory, and then stop the CD mechanism altogether (no spin) while the song
is playing. The buffer is stated to be 120 seconds. They don't say at what
bitrate this is. Here is a chronology of an actual song play I monitored:
[ A 4:33 MP3 at 160kbps ]
-0:05 Hit play, CD starts spinning.
0:00 Music starts playing.
0:20 CD stops spinning, music continues to play.
1:30 CD starts spinning again, music still playing.
1:50 CD stops spinning, music still playing.
3:00 CD starts spinning again, music still playing.
3:20 CD stops spinning, music still playing.
4:33 Song ends, CD spins up to load next song.
So it looks like the Volt needs to spin for 20 seconds to load enough music
to play for 1:30. Of course, this will probably vary a bit depending on
what bitrate you are using.
5. Between songs you can expect a 3-8 second pause. The pause length
depends, it seems, on whether the CD is already spinning at the end of the
previous song. If you listen to albums that require perfect contiguity, I
don't think you'll like this very much. I don't listen to many albums like
this myself, so the pauses, while not optimal, didn't bother me too much.
Kind of a nice break, actually.
6. There is a "Skip forward 10 songs" button.
7. There's an intro play mode. There's single repeat, all repeat, shuffle
all, repeat all in directory, and shuffle all in directory.
8. There's a hold switch.
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Support
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1. The package includes a copy of Adaptec Easy CD Creator 4. A nice touch
since this a decent program, and not crap. But I suspect most CD burner
owners already have this.
2. Didn't even look at the other CD, since the Volt doesn't need any drivers
or anything since it doesn't connect to your PC. I think it has MusicMatch
on it or something.
3. Rio just released a new firmware update for it a couple of days ago,
which is promising. Don't know if they have a news group.
4. This is kind of cool. In order to install new firmware, you download a
binary file, burn it onto a CD-R, and then "play" the firmware update into
the Volt. Nifty!
Well, that's all folks, if you have any specific questions I didn't answer
here, feel free to ask.
-- Red
Pete Clements
or do you have to tap a kep to make the title move?
thanks
Red Chair <entra...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:95njba$idd$1...@news.creativelabs.com...
Red Chair
smooth. Very readable. It could be a little faster, but that might be too
fast for other people.
-- Red
"Pete Clements" <peter...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:95oin4$a1n$2...@news.creativelabs.com...
Hansel Tan
Red instead
How good does it work with vibration/movement? Any chance of using it for
excercise or brisk walking?
thanks in advance.
Hansel
Metalhead
Thanks.
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(-_-)