Thought I should share my recent experiences...First off, it is amazing that I have held off the urge to get an mp3 player, period, until now. I have over 10gbs of mp3s, and have just begun to archive my cd collection in vbr format. Well the final straw was that I recently got cable internet access, and consequently have added an extra 3 gb in the past two weeks alone, courtesy of audiogalaxy satellite
Anyhow, I have wrestled with getting an mp3 player for god knows how long, the problem is that I am picky as heck-fire, and I always feel like the perfect device is just around the corner (rio riot, currently).
But this past week I finally caved. After some research I decided on ordering a RioVolt sp100 refurb direct from Sonicblue ($99.95). I was not going to be too picky about sound quality or whatnot, I just wanted something to casually listen to my mp3s when I am on campus during the day. My rioVolt arrived within 5 days of placing my order (fed-ex two day), but as fate would have it, I got a lemon! The thing wouldn't even spin-up! I would press the on button and the LCD would light-up with "Rio" and the dancer animation, it would take about a minute to power-up, and then it would display "No Disc", when it never spun the disc at all! And then of course, customer service is a biatch. I decided to just do a refund/return, tho they won't refund my initial shipping or the cost of me shipping it back to them. Two full days later, I am still waiting for my RMA# via email! Needless to say, I gave the poor rioVolt a good old smacking, see if I could get it to spin-up at all (hey it works with tv's sometimes, er, don't it?) Finally it did whirr and pop and click and kinda spin chitty chitty bang like, but alas the same "no disc" display.
Anyway, all that I read on message-boards and user comments about RioVolt and the company in general is true: them things are fragile! and their customer service blows!
A Few days later I was in Target and decided to check to see if they carried any cd mp3 players. To my surprise, they carried several, albeit phillips, koss, memorex and audiophase, but since I was boycotting rio, this suited me fine. I then remembered that I had a $30 voucher. I decided to go with the Memorex MPD8810, a garish orange/black water-resistant slab of plastic, $80. I remembered reading some semi-favorable reviews of a Memorex cd mp3 player, so decided to go with this one.
Impressions, it has only been a day of playing around with it, but my initial feeling is that it ain't bad. Sound is adequate, loud and abit bassy, fine for casual listening. It was a four-line text display, reads id3 tags(scrolls them slowly), reads/skips to directorys. It also has a nifty file-search and directory-search feature: you key in the name of a song/directory and it finds it.
Also it reads VBR mp3s fine. It does have trouble with some rogue mp3s downloaded from the internet, which is to be expected, some people don't know how to encode decently.
For $50, I am happy (using koss ksc-35's), now on to the bad...
Cons: (1) Only 120 second anti-shock, when walking it will skip if you just let it flop around in a saddle-bag or backpack. If you put it in a coat pocket or hold it in your hand, it won't skip much when walking. (2) 3-5 second pause between songs, tolerable but teeters on the verge of tolerability. (3) wish that you could browse the cd contents WHILE listening to a song. you have to stop playing a cd to browse it (Does the rio volt or tdk mojo let you browse and play simultaneously?) (4) the line-out is dependent on the volume control, what's the point?!!
But for $50 I think I can't complain...But of course being of the picky sort, I am considering getting either the tdk mojo, rio volt sp250 or slimx (tho having the lcd display relegated to the remote is not very appealing to me at all) Anybody have the TDK Mojo, I am interested in if it's interface is all that. It seems like its ability to load all the song names on initial cd load for browsing, would make a world of difference. I think they sell for about $115 now.......
Cheers
