Rio Volt SP250 Personal CD Player

Judging by reviews, the iRiver iMP-350 Slim X may become the CD/MP3 player of choice these days. It wins in the aesthetics department?no competition. But there remain many reasons to give Sonicblue?s RioVolt SP250 careful consideration.

NOTE: I?m not going to slavishly repeat the information you can get at sonicblue.com, or in the many published reviews. What follows is information that was hard to come by, or that became apparent only through use.

Design:
The SP250 doesn?t win any beauty pageants, which is fine by me. After all, next to the iPod, everything looks terrible. The SP250?s light, plastic case feels a little flimsy, but seems sufficiently durable. Sonicblue ships a faux leather cover for the player, which at least protects against scratches and minor bumps. Also, the unit ships with a line remote that the headphones can plug into. The remote lets you control most of what matters (volume, forward/backward search, play/pause, navigation, and CD/radio mode, among others). You can also buy a replacement remote from Sonicblue that includes a small LCD display. The iRiver requires the remote for operation, whereas the SP250 can be operated by its case or the remote?personally, I prefer having more options rather than fewer. The SP250 is fairly generous with accessories, and even provides an AC adapter to allow use without batteries, or recharging for the batteries (although it?s quite slow?an external charger can do the job in a third to a quarter of the time).

The manual:
It?s terrible, of course. But they all are--it would be pointless to expect more.

ID3 Tags?what am I listening to?
ID3 tag handling was the major feature that talked me into the SP250. ID3 tags are special data tags on an MP3 file that can display data like artist, album, title, track number, and so on (it can even hold lyrics and album covers, not that the SP250 can handle those). At the time I was comparison shopping, the other front-runner CD/MP3 player was the TDK Mojo. The Mojo takes a particularly brain-dead approach to tags. TDK invites you to rename all of your files so that the tag data appears in the file name. I?m not sure this even falls into the definition of a ?solution.? Needless to say, your files require massaging on your computer before they become useful on the player. I?m far too lazy and busy to do that.

The SP250 takes the smart approach. On inserting a new disc, it reads and caches all the ID3 tags in memory (and the data seems to survive battery changes). You can then navigate through your songs and subfolders, with each song displayed as ?Artist ? Track Title.?

This brings me to a major frustration with this device. Despite being rather customizable (a series of key presses brings up a special menu), the SP250 needs an option that reduces the size of the text on screen. The default font size is needlessly large, which means that for many artists, while navigating you simply see a list of the artist?s name repeated?the track title is off the screen. The only way to see the track title is to pause the navigation cursor for a couple seconds, at which point the song info starts to scroll right to left, showing the track title. Granted, they?re working with very limited screen real estate, but an option to use smaller text would be great and simple to implement.

On that note, while the firmware is upgradeable (meaning that Sonicblue can make changes or offer fixes and new features at any time), you?ll notice (at the time of this writing) that the site only offers the ?original? firmware for download?i.e., what the SP250 shipped with. One example: adding support for Ogg-Vorbis files. Sonicblue could add clever features like those I just suggested, but only time will tell if they?ll take the opportunity. Right now the prospects are dim.

Compatibility:
It seems hard to imagine now, but older players had a limit on the bitrate of MP3s they?d play. Since I rip and encode all my MP3s using EAC and LAME with VBR (variable bit rate), they will, at times, hit 320 kbps. The SP250, like many other current players, has no problems with VBR and/or high bitrate MP3s. It claims to work with WMA files as well, but I have no intention of ever testing that. They also claim to support Winamp playlists. This is all very cool, but you have to copy the tracks into one directory before you create the playlist (since the playlist records the paths to the files) and then burn all of it to a CD-R. Again, that?s way too much hassle for me.

Headphones:
Terrible, of course (both of them). Use our own cans: I?m partial to Grado GR60?s and Etymotic ER-6 earphones, but almost anything would be an improvement.

Battery life:
It?s possible that there?s actually a problem with my unit, but since I have no easy way to test that, you should know that the ?15 hour? play time figure Sonicblue provides is a stretch. I have tried the NiMH batteries that came with it, also a higher quality set of Powerex NiMH batts, and new alkalines just to make sure. In any case, the battery life seems to be about half that in my actual use. In fact, the battery life can up being much less that even half.

Here?s how they get these ?better than CD player? battery life figures. When you hit play, the SP250 spins up the CD for about 20-30 seconds, and then spins it down, although your music keeps playing. What it?s doing is caching the song in memory and saving power by not having to spin the disc. Ah but here?s the rub. As the track you?re listening to ends, the SP250 spins the disc back up to in order to cache and play the next track. Even if the track you just listened to is one minute long, and the next track is one minute long, the SP250 will spin up twice to read the songs, even though it could easily store both at once in memory. You would think that it would make sense to stuff the cache as full as possible when the user presses play. Sure, he or she might want to go elsewhere on the disc at some point, meaning that the cache must be emptied (and the power used to read the songs ends up wasted), but linear listening of tracks strikes me as a good bet.

Along that line, if you like to hop around the disc a lot, the CD will be spinning a lot, and your battery will give up its charge much faster. In fact, the only way that I can imagine how they justify that 15 hour rating is for listening to extremely long tracks?which would let the player fill its cache more efficiently and force the CD to spin as little as possible.

Sound:
Well?it?s pretty good. Which is to say, it strikes me as indistinguishable from most consumer level audio equipment. And let?s face it, if you?re using it anywhere but in the comfort and silence of your home, so-called audiophile sound quality would be wasted anyway. We live in a noisy world.

Conclusion:
I have no regrets about having bought the SP250. It serves its purpose well, and it will tide me over until the really amazing MP3 players emerge in the marketplace (well, the iPod is amazing, but far more than I care to spend or lose).

If you buy any MP3 player, don?t be surprised if it only takes six months to a year before you?re lusting after a newer model. MP3 products are evolving, and we?re somewhere in the bronze age right now.