MP3 and iPod
No shortage of MP3 player choices
By Ezilon.com Articles
Jan 25, 2006, 15:09

No shortage of MP3 player choices

A while back I raved about a portable digital music player from Creative Labs called the Nomad. I said it was the ideal no-skip music machine for joggers and walkers. It plays MP3 music files.

But the Nomad is by no means the only portable MP3 device available. I had a chance recently to play with two others: the second-generation Rio 500) from Diamond Multimedia and the Lyra Personal Digital Player from RCA.

For digital music neophytes, MP3 is a technology for ''compressing'' audio files so they take up less data storage space and can be transmitted relatively quickly - making it easier to download them from the Web or e-mail them.

The Rio 300 was the original MP3 music player to which I compared the Nomad in the earlier column. I thought the Nomad was miles better.

The first Rio was a controversial product. The record industry, fearing it would encourage more music piracy, tried to get a court injunction to stop Diamond selling it. That battle is now over.

And the new Rio 500 is a big improvement over the original model. It's also the only one of these three that works with a Mac.

In most respects - all but one - the Rio 500 compares very favorably to the Nomad. And they are about the same price. The new Lyra, the price leader of this trio, is a contender too. It's the only one that also plays Real G2 music files.

Like the Nomad, the Rio 500 comes with 32MB of internal memory, plus a removable 32MB SmartMedia flash memory card. Together that gives you about one hour of ''CD-quality'' MP3 music.

The Lyra comes with a 32MB CompactFlash memory card, but no internal memory - which pretty much accounts for the price difference.

The Rio connects to your PC via a USB (universal serial bus) connection, which makes for very fast downloads from hard disk to music player.

One of the few weak points of the Nomad is that it uses a much slower parallel port PC connection. The new version of the Nomad will use a USB connection, but as of mid-December, Nomad II had not appeared in Canadian online retail outlets.

The Lyra PC connection is different again. It comes with a memory card reader, which you plug into your PC's printer port. (You plug the printer back into the card reader's pass-through port.)

But the Lyra system downloaded files from PC to portable device slowest of the three.

The Rio 500 has a backlit LCD for showing menu options, status, track number and the like - something else the Nomad could use.

The Lyra also has a backlit LCD, and it's one you can turn on and off to preserve battery life.

The Lyra is by far the clunkiest of the three - a good 15 per cent bigger and heavier than the diminutive Rio 500 and Nomad.

On the other hand, because it has a little more real estate to work with, the Lyra's controls are easier to use because they're bigger and better spaced - especially in comparison to the Nomad.

Like the Rio, it has a multi-purpose volume/option-selection dial. Turning it adjusts volume. Pressing it changes to other modes - then turning the dial lets you make menu selections.

The Lyra and Rio also have some cool DSP (digital signal processing) and equalizer controls that let you play music as it might sound in a rock hall, jazz club, concert stage, etc. I wouldn't use them but some will.


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