Home > Consumer Reviews > RioVolt SP100 Portable CD/MP3 Player with 120 Second Anti-Shock

I have had my rio for less than 24hours....currently running firmware 1.09f (even though the latest on the rio webpage is 1.08f) Everything good you read about it is true..plays mp3, WMA, shows song names, very easy to use, can sort songs into folders (but currently not subfolders), works with CD-R, CD-RW (i have not tried it with regular cd's...i dont see the point!)...it even works with those little 8mm CD-R's, 120sec antishock is GREAT

Now for the bad, or annoying. The Volt (and remote) is made of pretty cheap plastic...not what I expected for $170. Sony makes better constructed CD players for $60. So either one of two things...the next version of this player will either be much cheaper, or more durable.

If you turn the player off then on again, the music doesnt stop where you left it...it starts at the begining of the CD.

If you are playing on battery power and plug in the AC, the unit shuts off.

If you are playing from AC and unplug it to switch to battery..the unit shuts off. Yet again you have to start at the begining of the CD, which is really annoying if you have 200 songs on a CD!!!!

The battery indicator on my rio (i am not sure if it is somethign wrong with my rio or the firmware) does not light up!, so i have NO indication of battery life!!!

This one annoys me big time...you do not have the choice to see the time LEFT on the song you are playing......you can only see the time ELAPSED. SUUUUXXX!

oh yeah, as i mentioned before, if you have songs under subfolders...oh well! ur screwed (i hope they fix this in a future firmware)

ANYHOW...with all that i am still pretty happy with it (but that is only cuase I expect they fix all that stuff (except the flimsy plastic) with firmware upgrades.

I did not have a chance to play with all the ... CD-R/MP3 players on the market, but I tried many of the lower priced players and there is no comparison. First, the player is, in my opinion, the most attractive. Second, it has a really useful display and an intuitive jog button to scroll through a disks subdirectories and contents. Third, the player has gold plated phone jacks and has as much an audiophile quality as you are going to find in a portable player.

The first thing I did was to upgrade the firmware using the latest version that was downloadable from the web. Follow the simple instructions and you will have a tremendous expansion in functionality, including a resume function, customizeable EQ function, and more. ....

One thing that is not advertised (in fact, the manual incorrectly states you cannot play it) is this players ability to hand disks with BOTH MP3 (data) and CD Audio on them, even with the original shipping firmware. Other players would play one or the other or not at all! You can play them both easily from the same disk!

The two weak areas for this player: while the earphones are great quality, I would like to find a person that can keep these in their ears! They keep falling out of mine. Second, the software is lame. You can get it free elsewhere...so what's to say thanks for, Diamond?? If you buy a burner, you already get Adaptec's standard CD creator and DirectCD (ver 4). Also, Diamond only provides the standard version of RealJukeBox 2.0 which you can download from the web for free and it limits you to creating no better than 96kbps MP3s from Audio CD's. (The full version will run you ...!) You will want better than that for this player. WMA's sound excellent on this player and can be created best by Windows Media Player 7.1. RealJukeBox seems to lock/secure any WMA's I create, whether I turn the option off or not, so I cannot (or have not found a way) to play protected WMA's on the RioVolt.

Shock protection is fantastic for this unit. It has so much memory, you will notice the disk is often sitting still!

Oh, and the remote is really convenient for operating the unit in the provided vinyl case...although the remote feels like a cheap piece of plastic and is so covered with buttons I find it hard to handle the remote without pushing a button accidentally.

Overall, excellent player folks! You need to get one. Upgrade the player immediately! This is one of the units strongest features! I am very satisfied with it.

When I first got the unit, I loved it when I played the first song on my MP3-CDRW, when it got to the second one, SKIPPING ALL THE WAY!... Then I noticed that it was always skipping at the same place, even though it did not skip when I played it in the computer. This was a song I downloaded from the internet, so I don't know what program was used to compress the song. So what I did was to reencode the song, turned it into a WAVE and then back into MP3, WOOHOO! NO MORE PROBLEMS!! So all of you who are having problems with some songs, that I am sure were not encoded by you, this is the fix. Now I get hundred of hours of great non-skip music. Also I have found that the unit starts playing CD-R faster than CD-RW, so if you are kind of annoyed by the 20 seconds or so that it takes for CD-RWs to start playing, try using CD-Rs... This unit is great and I recommended over any other unit out there right now!

I wanted a portable audio solution that would play my many cds and my (even more) many mp3s. After a little research, it looked like this was the hit. I haven't used it enough to kill the batteries, but I've prolly used it for over 10 hours so far. The actual piece of hardware feels very strong and compact, and is just about a big as a normal cd player. The screen is backlit so it's easy to read. There is an inline remote for the headphones (bad headphones, but I don't like earbuds anyway!). etc etc My only real concern when I first bought it was "How is it going to identify my mp3s?" You see, I don't use id3 tags, becuase I primarily store full albums on my computer. So each album has a directory, and in each is a filename - .mp3 It works well for me but I had seen nothing about using it w/o id3 tags. But, to my pleasure, the Rio simply identified each mp3 by its name. The whole system works beautfully. When playing mp3s, the cd doesn't spin after ~20 sec into the song, therefore is unskippable hehe. I've gotten it to skip when playing a normal cd on 10 sec skip protect by shaking the unit for 10 sec, but isn't that expected? :) I can't recommend this unit enough. I love it. I've been looking for something this capable and useful and easy to use for months. Good luck figuring out what to get... gimme an email if you have a question.

iocax

You got it. This muscic lovers device has it all. From the makers of PC hardware(Diamond), they really did an outstanding job in engineering. Having upgradeable firmware makes this divine electronic being separates it from the wannabe's. Despite the supposed downfalls of other reviews, the ear buds are really not that bad. As for the carrying case, it would be nice to stow the phones and remote in it. Don't look for the power switch like I did out of the box(or that sealed for your protection impossible to get into plastic). It don't got none. You depress the center of that D-pad to power up. To turn off, simply press the stop symbol on the D-pad and it shuts off after around 10 seconds or pop the hood. The latest firmware has lots of enhancements such as faster loading time. I think this is the best MP3 device on the market right now. What would top it is the 6 gigabyte player that cost 500 bucks. But who wants to upload all that music anyway? This is no disappointment. Thank you Diamond Multimedia.