Home > Consumer Reviews > Rio SP50 MP3/CD Player

This is such a good product. It plays MP3/CDs CD-R/CR-RW CDs and of course normal CDs. How can you argue with that? This is the ultimate music companion. The ESP Shock Protection is ideal for people who are on the move when they are listening to their music, like me.If you really want to you can put on a track, switch on the ESP Shock Protection and shake your player as much as you like and the music will not skip or stop!(Believe me I've tried it) The only reason I didn't give this item a 5* ratings is because I was disappointed with the fact that when I put in an MP3/CD that I had made and it never came up with the ID3 tags that were promised in the item description. But that is only a minor problem, the reality is that your player will be probably either in your coat pocket or somewhere you can't see it when you are listening to it, so it doesn't really matter too much.

Buy it!(I did and I'm really happy)

This is an amazing value piece of kit. The storage on CD is an excellent idea, there is not the usual limit of an album or two, but you can get up to ten on one 25p CD. The battery life is superb and the non-skip faultless. Why are there not more devices using this idea? Lack of mains supply a slight disappointment, but very, very good value equipment. Get one!

I've had the Rio SP50 for about a month now and used it every single day. It is absolutely fantastic. No skips whatsoever on playback. It effortlessly plays around 9 or 10 albums worth of MP3 material burned onto either CD-R and CD-RW media. I cannot recommend this unit highly enough.

Only gripe - ditch the terrible headphones that are supplied. I bought a pair of Sony headphones which were a Vast improvement. Also, I would recommend buying yourself some Ni-MH Uniross rechargeable batteries to go with the unit.

I've had my Riovolt player for a few months now and wouldn't swap it for the world - I can't believe more companies aren't making CD mp3 players.

The Riovolt player itself is quite small and feels well built. It has all the features you'd expect from a normal discman - track shuffle, bass modes etc and also has a useful 'hold' button (to stop you from accidentally hitting one of the buttons when it's in your pocket for example).

It's as an mp3 player though where the unit really comes into it's own.

The main advantages are that it is tag ID compatible i.e. can read the file names as written on your PC, and the unit also has a great 'navigate' button that allows you to browse the contents of a disc, just like you would on Windows on your PC. The unit also has an EQ feature to let you choose between different settings - 'live' or rock' for example. There is also a 'lineout' jack to allow you to connect with an amp/Hi-Fi. The unit also plays WMA files and files with variable bit-rates. If you record at 128kbps (the standard bit-rate) the sound quality doesn't suffer and this works out at about 1mb of disc space a minute - between 700 - 800 minutes of music per CD! Put a disc in, press the shuffle button and it's just like having a jukebox in you pocket.

The only disappointment is the lack of a power supply, but that's a small grumble as they're pretty inexpensive to buy.

Forget minidisks and bog-standard mp3 players - CD mp3 players are the future and Riovolt are already ahead of the pack. This really is a 'must buy' for any music lovers with access to a PC / CD rewriter.

(Note - my comments are about the sp90 model, slightly more advanced than the sp50 model)

This is not for everyone especially with the falling prices of USB drive MP3 players. But, for the price this is a good product.

I liked the idea of MP3 CD players since this means I can also play my normal CDs which I don't necessarily want to rip to Mp3. Plus I have easy CD-burning facilities at work and home and I'm not too stingy with using CD-R's for burning little things when ever I feel like it. So for me this inexpensive little device with fairly effective ant-shock buffer was quite ideal.

A small gripe I had with it is that the interface is not the easiest to use. The buttons are a little stubborn (I guess on the flip side this means you don't accidentally keep hitting them) and you have to push a sequence of buttons if you want specific tracks. The cross scrolling display provides adequate information on the current playing track but is not quite as easy to use when trying to select a specific track. I also found I kept forgetting the sequence of buttons I had to press when I first used this. With big MP3 players and MP3-CDS as well I think it's important to have the ability to browse intuitively because it's possible to store hundreds or thousands of tracks and without proper browsability, all you can do is play tracks in random order like some souped up radio station. I also wasn't quite sure what the default order for playing tracks on an MP3CD was - I think it goes alphabetically by folder name then by track name.

That said, it does provide all the facilities to browse and select tracks and you will remember it after a couple of goes. If you're also dilligent enough to use useful folder and tracknames it'll can be close to perfect. Personally I decided to be conservative and not completely cram every CD-R with as many tracks into it as I could - instead if you have a theme to each CD-R or limit yourself to putting only 3 or 4 albums on each it makes it easier to browse around.

In summary, I'll just offer a few reasons why you might want to buy it over other MP3 players.
- fits way more than most USB-drive/MP3 players
- allows you to play normal CD albums unlike non-CD MP3 players (think of this before you go buying a mini-CD MP3 player - in my oppinion these are the least useful)
- cheaper than almost every thing else out there that plays MP3s