Home > Consumer Reviews > Rio SP50 MP3/CD Player

Despite giving this product a relatively modest three stars, I would probably still advise most people seriously looking at it to buy it. The reason is this - the sound quality is very good (although a little weak with the bass boost off), it'll hold 15 albulms on mp3 and most of all, its cheap. It offers much better value than the more expensive HD players, often with less storage space. However, it eats batteries at an ammazing rate (this seems to be a problem with the low power shutdown on mine and might be an individual fault though) and being CD based, rather than hard disk it does have a tendency to skip if you're walking quickly or running with it.

The first thing that struck me about the Rio SP50 is how loud the amp is in it. Even with the volume on zero there is a very noticeable hiss though the headphones, so much so that when using a car kit it virtually negates the point of using an mp3/cd player. The actual sound is ok, very bassey, although somewhat dead sounding (even on cd) if you can get past the background noise !.

The album browse function is rather limited as the number of characters is to short (for most of teh stuff I listen to anyway), so you have to guess what is what in some cases. Apparently this unit reads the ip3 tags, as far as I could tell it was using the directory and filename for the album information.

I suppose for £50 you can't expect that much in the way of hi-fi, but unless your desperate for mp3 playback, I'd spend the £50 on a better quality normal cd player, or spend a bit more for an mp3 enabled device.

This piece of kit does exactly what I want it to do. I put the batteries in and loaded it with 10 hrs worth of CD tracks saved as MP3s and set it to Random Play and it's fine. I didn't bother with the included headphones but stuck to my trusty Sony headset. I leave the base boost on all the time and it gives a pleasing sound without loosing the "top end". As it comes without an A/C adapter I used my Uniross variable voltage adaptor. I set it to 4.5 Volts, as instructed and made sure that the polarity was correct. Unfortunately the Riovolt switched itself off during MP3 loading on most occasions. When it did manage to load I couldn't get it to play any track without skipping within the first three seconds. I went to the Bluesonic website, sent an email describing the problem but received no reply after two days. I then decided to try reducing the DC input from 4.5 Volts to 3 Volts (on the basis that the max voltage from two AA batteries is 3.00 Volts)and, BINGO!, it works fine! Hope this info helps anyone with similar problems.

Bought this some time ago, and still works a treat. Created a bespoke MP3 CD with 11 albums on, ripped to MP3, and this plays them perfectly. Does not jump or skip if knocked thanks to the buffer.

I'm afraid I had problems with this MP3 CD player from the minute I unpacked it.

1. Both slide buttons on the side - "Unlock/Lock" and "Bass/Normal" are stuck in position and cannot be moved at all.

2. The battery meter does not work correctly, one second it displays full battery power, the shows the batteries as having run out.

3. It does not play MP3 CDs! I have burnt numerous CDs on the Mac using iTunes and although they come up and play perfectly on a PC or Mac, the SP50 player refuses to play them, coming up with the message: NO CD MP3 DATA?.

Other problems include the sound quality - it really is very average (far inferior to audio from a computer for example) and you shouldn't expect much. It does play normal audio CDs perfectly though, with no gap between tracks, so it can still act as a (very cheap) walkman. I've also had no problems with the ESP anti-skip feature.

If you still want to buy this product, I would recommend you actually try it out so you aren't disappointed like me - you'd also have more chance of getting a refund from a real store!