so, how is that fabulous little Karma?
Sep 15, 2003 at 11:56 PM Thread Starter Post #1 of 37
fappar

fappar

100+ Head-Fier
Joined
Apr 4, 2003
Posts
398
Likes
10
i need testimonials! people, i am too hawt for the forum search feature, and this will be a good place to gather and mesh all items from all of those carious threads
 
Sep 15, 2003 at 11:59 PM Post #2 of 37
Dont believe anyone has it yet, dont think the 40gb is in stock and the 20gb is supposedly in but at a steep price compared to the 40gb preorder so think it will still be a while untill the impressions start coming in, waiting for them myself
 
Sep 16, 2003 at 12:07 AM Post #3 of 37
You won't really find any testimonials yet, since the Karma is not yet out. I can't say exactly other than "soon".

I've been testing the Karma since July and have seen it progress from a beta unit to a final production. Note, I am not a DNNA employee. It is a _very_ solid product and I am confident it will do well in the market. Sound quality wise it is absolutely wonderful. It uses the same amplification as the iPod so it will sound as good if not better (there have been many audio tweaks over the course of the beta test). Feature wise it is really amazing - I can connect to the player over ethernet with a web browser, load up the Java applet, and I can manage the music on the Karma (upload new, download, make playlists, etc). How cool is that! Battery life is very good too, it is possible to get 15 hours if you are running 128 kbit/sec mp3's. Finally, how could you say no to a mp3 player with visualization like analog VU meters? Watching the needles bounce make me very happy.

If you have any specific questions let me know and I'll try to answer them.
 
Sep 16, 2003 at 12:29 AM Post #4 of 37
Hey ian,

Since the Karma is going to support additional formats like FLAC, Ogg, etc., I was curious since I noticed you mentioned the battery life in combination with the bitrate. Is this bitrate connected to bat life or is it someones rough approximation of a songs time length/bitrate resulting in an average file size. The iPod has its well known 9 meg song/buffer limit before the battery is adversely affected. FLAC will likely break any limit, but curious if --ape/--api or largish Ogg files would also.

Thanks.
 
Sep 16, 2003 at 1:14 AM Post #5 of 37
I hope it doesn't affect it that much, or I might have to reconvert all of my music from Wav (which I never deleted...
tongue.gif
), I have all of mine set at 500kbps VBR, and it sounds fantastic, I'd probably just use wav files, but they don't have ID tags
biggrin.gif
 
Sep 16, 2003 at 3:27 PM Post #6 of 37
I honestly don't have an accurate answer to your question. My unit is currently in for a hardware patch. Even if I had it to test this, the battery life isn't accurate since my hardware isn't final revision (there have been changes to battery life). I have e-mailed my contacts at DNNA to get an answer and will post any information I get.
 
Sep 16, 2003 at 5:04 PM Post #7 of 37
ian: in short: better than new ipod? what do you think?
biggrin.gif
 
Sep 16, 2003 at 10:12 PM Post #8 of 37
Yes, much better! It is a very solid little unit.
More features, same size (just different dimensions, it is more squareish and very rounded), same capacity, for the same price.
 
Sep 16, 2003 at 10:16 PM Post #9 of 37
I got one response from a hardware engineer:

All bit rate encoding being equal, MP3 uses the least battery power.
WMA has a more complex algorithm so it sucks more battery life. He doesn't
know exact details unfortunately. He's not sure about Flac and Ogg but
theorizes that since they have more complex algorithm, they might suck more
battery life than MP3 and WMA.

The question has been forwarded to one of the Karma engineers in Cambridge.
 
Sep 17, 2003 at 4:42 PM Post #10 of 37
Got a few more responses from the Rio engineers. Note, none of these figures have been tested. They are doing the tests right now, and these are just guesses copied from his e-mail to me:

There are two factors that determine battery life, in general:

- Decode CPU consumption
- Bitrate (determines spinup frequency)

In general, the decode consumption is far by the biggest factor in battery
life. I know that FLAC is currently taking more power than MP3, although
when optimised it shouldn't (it's on the to-do list). My power spreadsheet
suggests that if it were the same CPU load as MP3, an 800kbps FLAC would
have about 12 hours battery life, but this hasn't been tested.

OGG will suck a lot more battery life than FLAC, despite the lower bitrates.
I'm estimating a worst-case (for a 200kbps FLAC) as being in the 10 hour
range. Again, this hasn't been tested

The Karma doesn't suffer like the iPod does with large files (or did: are
you sure it still has a bug with big files?). We don't cache on a file basis
as that would just be silly - we cache chunks of playable data, hence there
is no difference between caching 10x1mb files or one 10mb file.

Note (to everyone) that on the first play, tracks will take marginally more
power as the track profiler will be profiling the audio data - subsequent
plays are marginally more power efficient.
 
Sep 17, 2003 at 9:52 PM Post #13 of 37
Quote:

new seller, no buy history, item not available yet, do the math, sounds kind of shady to me.


OR, it could be one of the beta testers...Though I'd not be the one to try that theory out.
 
Sep 18, 2003 at 12:41 AM Post #15 of 37
I promise you that isn't a legit auction
smily_headphones1.gif
And I really doubt it's a beta tester.
It will be available soon.

And no, beta testers usually don't have send the units back as long as they do a decent job testing.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Users who are viewing this thread

Total: 2 (members: 0, guests: 2)
Back
Top