RioVolt SP350 Ultra-Thin CD-MP3 Player with Car Kit

[Archived in $100 - $200, CD Players With Car Kits, MP3-CD Players, Products, RioVolt]

Manufacturer: RioVolt
Price at amazon.com: $179.99
This item is not stocked or has been discontinued.

Product Features:

• Plays MP3 and WMA CD's, CD-R, CD-RW and CD's
• Integrated FM Tuner with 32 minute skip protection
• Ultra-thin, high performance player
• Easy navigation on backlit, 4 line text display
• Comes with Car Kit (car cassette and power adapter), high quality headphones, carrying case and remote control

Product Description:

At less than an inch thick, the SP350 CD player is a sleek, eye-catching portable that plays both standard music CDs and discs stacked to the gills with MP3 and Windows Media Audio (WMA) files. Assembling collections on a CD burner gives you the option of storing an incredible 24 hours of WMA music on a single CD-R or CD-RW. You also get text display for ID3 title information, showing track and artist information while music plays on its large, four-line, lighted LCD. Enjoy 30 minutes of electronic shock protection using SteadyPlay technology--that's longer than the average workout. And you'll get 20 hours of playback time. An FM tuner, programmable playlists, adjustable equalization, bass boost, folder navigation, repeat play, and shuffle play broaden listening options. The package includes a RioVolt SP350, high-quality headphones, a complete car kit, two rechargeable NiMH batteries, a software CD-ROM, and a Getting Started guide.

Description from Manufacturer:At less than an inch thick, the SP350 CD player is a sleek, eye-catching portable that plays both standard music CDs and discs stacked to the gills with MP3 and Windows Media Audio (WMA) files. Assembling collections on a CD burner gives you the option of storing an incredible 24 hours of WMA music on a single CD-R or CD-RW. You also get text display for ID3 title information, showing track and artist information while music plays on its large, four-line, lighted LCD.

Enjoy 30 minutes of electronic shock protection using SteadyPlay technology--that's longer than the average workout. And you'll get 20 hours of playback time. An FM tuner, programmable playlists, adjustable equalization, bass boost, folder navigation, repeat play, and shuffle play broaden listening options. The package includes a RioVolt SP350, high-quality headphones, a complete car kit, two rechargeable NiMH batteries, a software CD-ROM, and a Getting Started guide. Average Customer Rating:

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Comment: The bar has been raised again. Rating:
As an owner of the original Rio Volt (SP100) I appreciated that it was the first good, usable mp3-CD player, but eventually got tired of some of its shortcomings: inefficient display, with the dancing stick figures, odd remote and well, it was bulky, even for a CD player. This new Volt (SP350) adresses all of those minor issues, and adds a few new features over the old one.

First, the new design aesthetic is great - brushed stainless steel front plate, grippy grey plastic around the edges. It feels like a vastly higher quality piece of equipment than the original, or any other CD or MP3 player i've used recently, Apply iPod excepted (that's the gold standard for quality design/construction). The buttons have a more uniform feel and you can acutally use the player while it's in the case this time.

Second, the new display and firmware make organizing the 70 to 100 songs on the usual mp3 cd more convenient than before. The addition of an FM tuner is a nice touch as well.

Other notes: the buttons on the remote are small, but at least you can hit each of them individually, as opposed to guessing on one big circular button as on the SP100. It also seems that you can turn the player off from the remote, but not back on.
The sound quality is great as before, and the headphone amp is easily powerful enough to keep me from turning it up all the way. Granted they're no Grado's, but the included headphones are at least comfortable and sound alright out of the box.

In summary this is a great CD-MP3 player, and definitely worth the upgrade from one of the older generation players. Or, if you're in the market for your first one, you won't go wrong here. It has a quality feel and sound that makes it worth the money. Highly Recommended.

Review Updated...with the following information:
To counterpoint the opinions of the people that have had problems with this player, I wrote the initial review after using the player for a few hours a day for a few days. It has now been a few months and my opinions listed above still hold. It's still playing like new, no display issues, reads all of my MP3 cd's and normal cd's and has never skipped.
Perhaps there was a statistically large number of failures from a certain batch of these, but I can find little to complain about with my particular unit. I'd still recommend this player based on it's great sound and efficient design, just keep the warranty card around based on the number of complaints here.

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Comment: Great features, poor MP3 playback Rating:
I got this player a few weeks back, direct from SONICblue. The feature set that they crammed into that little round case is incredible; however, they should have spent more time perfecting the features that they push as the unit's high-points.

The sound quality is outstanding. FM reception is decent; which is to say, better than most portable players.

Now, some of the downsides... MP3 playback is horrible. For a player that claims to have such a long anti-skip buffer my player sure seems to skip a lot when playing MP3s (Audio CDs work fine, I haven't tried WMA files). The unit frequently skips to different songs and has locked up completely (where all controls stop functioning and the batteries had to be removed) once. The only way I could get MP3 disks to work correctly was to starting burning my CD-R and CD-RW disks at very low speeds (1-4x, depending on the media). Disks burnt at speeds greater than 16x skip every few seconds and disks written faster than 24x rarely work at all. It should be noted that burnt audio CDs do not seem to have this problem.

The other downsides are minor at worst. I would have liked to have seen the LCD backlight be on all the time when the unit is not running from batteries (like the Sony I had before this one). Also, the manual is only available on the CD, no print copy is provided.

Hopefully the MP3 problem can be fixed in a firmware update. If not, you'll see my player on eBay inside of a month...

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Comment: sucks!!!! Rating:
what's wrong with this player. it is supposedly feature laden; however, the features do not work most of the time. do not buy this piece of junk.

Posted at November 11, 2003 07:59 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)