[PeterDLai]

Rio, now under the ownership of D&M, has been quietly working on an entirely new series of Rio products including a hard disk drive player (20/40 GB) and a new line of sporty flash players (128/256 MB). They are also going to have two new models which use Cornice's technology at 1.5 GB inside a small player. This is already being used by RCA, and it's going to be used by iRiver in the iGP-100.

The hard disk player was known as the Rio Project "Pearl". Now it seems that the official name of the product is Rio Karma, which I have referred to before. Amazon.com (not any international version of Amazon) has the entire new series of Rio products listed, however they cannot be purchased and there are not any pictures. If you go on Amazon and search for "Digitalway" and scroll to the bottom, you'll find all of the products (click Next to get to next page). These include the Karma, Fuse, Chiba, Cali, Eigen, and Nitrus. Fuse, Chiba, and Cali are all flash players, Karma is a HDD player, and Eigen and Nitrus are 1.5 GB players.

Information about the technology used in the Eigen and Nitrus!

Some pictures of the new models!

The axe blade one is the Chiba, the yellow one is probably the Cali sport one, and the Fuse is the MuVo-look-a-like. The Rio Karma if you do not know is the top one. I think they look pretty sexy. I have heard that the developers of these did not name them, BTW.

The Rio Karma was listed at J&R, but they took it off. I already know of at least one person who ordered it already from J&R before they delisted it. It costed $500 at J&R (for the 40 GB model) and right now Amazon's price for it for 40 GB is around $443 I think. I'm too lazy to go back and check.

Now we have to wait for the next HDD player from Toshiba. It's supposedly super-thin, but I'm guessing that will come at the cost of battery life (just like the iPod), but hopefully Toshiba will be smart this time and create an all-around nice player. Things are heating up!

 

[strohmie]

Even though I'm not in line for a new portable (loving my Zen), those look pretty spiffy. Props to them on putting Sennheiser buds into the package for what looks like three of them.

 

[D-EJ915]

I like the way the "karma" looks, but I still get the willies when I think of how the SP90 sounded, ugh

 

[lan]

hmmm, i may have to try some of these when they come out. i need compactness. the iPod is just too large for me.

 

[Gojira]

Nice links. It's certainly interesting. I have also never associated Iriver with sound quality. I recall reading a lot of complaints specifically about the poor sound quality of their PCDPs on Amazon.com back when I was shopping for a modern PCDP. When non-audiophiles listening with bad headphones actually complain about the sound, it definitely gives me pause. Admittedly it's hard to judge anything listening with stock phones, but still. I steered clear of Iriver for that reason. I ended up buying a Sony D-CJ01, which cannot have been the right decision, although it looks really cool.

If the company has really changed hands, then perhaps we will see some improvement in sound quality. It's too bad that their players are going to support the ultra-slow USB 2.0 standard.

I assume that a Cornice "Storage Element" is some kind of volatile solid state memory. That's rather mysterious.

 

[callanish]

I don't think USB 2.0 is that slow. Now try USB 1.1 on my notebook. That's slow. The reason this harddrive player interests me is its 10/100 ethernet connection for transferring music. My notebook has already got a wireless card on it so adding and removing a USB 2.0 Card would be a pain.

I'm also one of those previous RioVolt customers with a SP250 player that hasn't missed a beat after two years so if the sound output is twice as strong as my sp250, the software used to transfer music is convenient and powerful, the sound quality comes even close to the Ipod or Zen, then I'm in line as a future customer....

LTM