Rio CD / MP3 player

I recieved the Rio volt CD MP3 player a couple of days ago. A friend purchased it from the States for me. It is not yet out in the UK, but its price will be around £170. I bought it for £120. So far it has done everything stated on the box. I can play CDR's (700mb ones!) and CDRW's. With no problems what so ever. I am able to file them in seperate folders and the player allows you to search through the file system. I can now store 12 albums worth on one CD! The machine itself is quite solid, similar to a normal largeish portable CD player. It is not one of those slim line versions. Sound ... more

I see lots of reviews for the Creative Labs portable hard drive (300 GBP) and various other portable MP3 players (100 GBP to 300GPB but with very limited playtime and very expensive removable media). Not only that , the Sunday supplements and PC mags tell us that we need to spend at least 250 GBP to have MP3 on the move. First of all MP3 is music , and the cheapest way to get music on the move is on tape. A SONY walkman costs from about 11.99 GBP with tapes of varying length for around 1GBP. This is convenient but , I don’t like compiling tapes any more and tape is inherently fragile ... more

This beast can play both MP3s and standard CDs, but most people will buy it for MP3 playback. Skipping is no problem - the track is read into memory, so this player is ideal for use in-car with a cassette adaptor. I use the SP-90 with Beyer Dynamic headphones and it sounds way better than through the supplied headphones. An immediate improvement in functionality can be obtained by downloading the SP-100 firmware, editting the first few bytes to SP-90, renaming the image file to SP-90, and then burning the resultant file to a blank CD. Insert this CD into the player (with a new set of batteries ... more