Rio Volt SP90 Personal CD Player

The SP90 is a fine sub-100 dollar mp3/CD player. It is approximately the same player as the Rio Volt SP100, only without an LCD backlight, AC adapter, remote, and external ESP switch. Note that all the SonicBlue mp3/CD players are rebranded versions of mp3/CD players made by iRiver. The SP90 is a downgrade of the SP100 for a reduced price.

The LCD screen supports two rows of text and two rows of miscellaneous information. The top row has icons displaying repeat, shuffle, and low battery warning. The second row contains track number and time. The third row has artist and title information or filename for mp3s and wmas. The last row is wasted by little dancing figures and an animated round thing that serves no purpose. This makes navigation of the file system limited to two lines. It would be nice if SonicBlue/iRiver had actually made use of the last 1/4 of the LCD screen for something like displaying the folder name or displaying artist and title info on separate lines. The lineout plug is affected by the volume control for some reason. In all the CD players I've seen before, they were constant. It's neither a good or bad thing for me, just kind of weird. The plastic buttons are sturdy enough. My only complaint with the controls is that they put rewind, fast forward, play, and stop on one large round button. It's easy to accidentally hit the wrong function if you apply any sideway pressure. The round pad also forces you to look at it when you use any of the four functions. It's very difficult to do it by touch alone, which is useful when you're driving or when it's dark; you'll have first figure out which way is up/down/left/right by the positions of other components of the player. Buying the optional remote helps but then you might as well just get the SP100. The SP90 is opened by sliding the blue switch on the front. It only opens up partially on its own so you'll have to lift it up by hand. The included earbuds are low quality, which is about standard for most headphones included with a music player. You should be cautioned about DC-in on this thing. I tried two separate 4.5V DC car adapters manufacturered by Sony and Panasonic and neither worked. The plug might be proprietary, forcing you to buy power adapters from SonicBlue. iRiver is a Korean company so they might use some other standard that SonicBlue didn't bother to convert. This doesn't affect me much because I've got NiMH batteries and a one hour charger usable at home and in the car. However, it may be wise to check with SonicBlue on this.

I've had no problem with skipping as some others have reported. The SP100 has a firmware upgrade that reduces gaps between tracks and possibly reduces skipping. While the SP90 is not officially firmware upgradable, it can use use the SP100 firmware to get added features and improvements. All it takes is a simple renaming of the file and a hex edit to change the name inside the file. Instructions can be found at http://www.geocities.com/sp90hack. This voids the warranty so use at your own risk. Some new features as of version 2.10 are reduced gaps, resume for last 10 discs played, katakana font display, winamp playlist support, display of time remaining, and reduced disc recognition time. Also, ESP control for audio CDs is lost because the SP100 has an external control for changing it between 10 and 40 seconds while the SP90 has a menu option in the original firmware.

SP90 is a good economy player with solid features. You should know that iRiver recently came out with the ChromeX iMP-150 for the US market. It's an upgrade to the SP100/iMP-100 with better button placement and a much better LCD screen (smaller pixels and no dancing!). It includes backlight and remote, but no AC adapter. ChromeX costs only slightly more than the SP90 barring rebates. If you're considering buying the SP100 for its backlight and remote, definitely go with the ChromeX. It's designed by the same people and is much better and has a lower cost. If you're willing to spend more, go with the SP250 or iRiver SlimX.