Rio Karma 20Gb MP3 Player

I have to say my research was justified. It has all the features I was waiting for before I commited my hard earned money to a purchase: Reads WMA (not ipod), MP3, WAV, Ogg vorbis, FLAC - check // USB 2.0 support - check // Ethernet Port - check (excellent inclusion by the way) // Audio outs for conection to stereo system - check // Rio Taxi (transport files between computers) - check.

Add to this the excellent battery life, compact design, durability, rio dj, gapless playback (mix cd's now playable on DAP - superb), excellent sound quality (parent company is Denon), good volume levels & excllent EQ.

What can I say - bloody excellent. My player sits atop my Stereo in it's cradle, wired to my Stereo (havn't played a CD since I got it). It's got an ethernet cable which links to my PC in another room and updates automatically when I record another CD. Then when I'm out and about I simply pick up and slip in the pocket. I've been away for a week - battery still ok after possibly 15+ hours of playback.

Whatever you do, get this if you're after a DAP. And just to re-assure you this is my first review for amazon. I'm a busy person but really had to let fellow consumers know how pleased I am with this peice of hardware. SIMPLY MAGIC!!!

Before I purchased this player, I did about 6 months of Internet research and found that the Karma provided the features I was after. This highlights an important point – different players have different features and will be suitable, or not, to different people. This one was right for me.

First then, what the Rio Karma does NOT do. It does not have a radio. Nor can it record from external sources. So you cannot record voice messages – meetings, lectures etc. Neither can you encode music direct to the player. I’m not fussed about recording conversation, but want to convert my old cassettes to mp3 and thought I would like to have this feature, until I realised that starting and stopping recording at the right time can be fiddly and if you don’t get it right first time you have to try again (and again) until you do – you cannot edit the start and end of music files on any hard-disk player I found. It is so much easier to record straight to you computer – you can get free software to edit when a song starts or finishes so you just record the whole side of a cassette / record and separate the songs.

Secondly the player is not recognised as a separate hard drive. You CAN store files on the Karma, but need to use the software that comes with the player to do so. This means you need to install the software on more than one computer if you want to transfer files between them. I do not do this, so it wasn’t important to me.

The battery is not replaceable. Rio does have a very popular (and very useful) associated website (www.riovolution.com), which is even contributed to by people who work for Rio. It is a great place to go to for support and advice. It is widely quoted there that the battery will give 500 full recharge cycles at 15 hours a go before going down to about 80% capacity (12 hours) for another 500 cycles. This gives approx 13,500 hours of use. Work out how long this will last you. I reckon on 9 years at 4 hours use per day. There is also speculation that third party replacement batteries are available in Japan and on their way over here.

Finally the screen is apparently prone to scratches. I have not taken the chance and applied an LCD screen protector, using a template available from Riovolution. It is easy to do and is hardly noticeable.

If this all sounds negative then maybe the Karma isn’t for you. I have a wide range of music (2,000+ songs has used just short of 8Gb). If, like me, you are more concerned with listening to music than the features above, then I believe the Karma is the best currently available. Sound quality is superb even at high volumes, the supplied headphones are very capable and the player has excellent equaliser options. The amount of file types supported is comprehensive (mp3, wma, FLAC, Ogg Vorbis). The VU meters during playback seemed like a gimmick, but are strangely addictive to watch. If you prefer, though, you can simply view the progress bar or list of songs.

I have yet to find a portable audio player with 20Gb+ memory that has the playback features of the Rio Karma. With the Karma you can choose to listen to music by Album, Artist, Genre, Year, recently added to player, recently played, most played, least played, used to play a lot but haven’t recently, sounds of the '40s, '50s, '60s, '70s, '80s, '90s, '00s, and random mix lasting set duration. Additionally most of these options can be automatically generated using Rio DJ and setting your preferred parameters. More than that you can easily combine features so you could listen to all songs from two or more artists/albums/genres/years. You can also create playlists from any selection of songs you make while you are on the move – no need for your computer - and then playback in order, shuffled or repeated. Finally, you can do all this while listening to music, with no delays or jumps.

Some last good points, the Rio Music Manager software is very simple to use and does what you would expect it to (encode and transfer songs, edit id3 tags, play music etc). The interface on the Karma is also very easy to use and navigate, with some customisable features including support for both left- and right-handed people. The machine is smaller than I expected, yet I even knew the dimensions (approx 75mm x 78mm x 25mm) and saw pictures comparing to, say, cigarette packets and the iPod before I bought it.

In conclusion, I wholeheartedly recommend this player. It does not attempt to be jack-of-all trades and therefore succeeds in its main aim and purpose – to store a vast amount of music and playback with quality. I know this is a long review, but I found such reviews hard to find and did not want to spend nearly £300 on something that was not right for me. I hope this is useful and helps you out.

A little background - Rio Audio was previously owned by Sonic Blue, who had a less than stellar reputation for customer service, firmware updates etc. Sonic Blue then got into financial difficulty and sold the Rio line to Digital Networks North America (DNNA), who you may not have heard of, but are owned by Denon Marantz, makers of serious audiophile hi-fi equipment - an excellent sign for the customer!

The Karma's advertised as a 20GB player, but as is usual with hard drives, this is taking a gigabyte to be 1000000000 bytes - the actual capacity is more like 18.5GB. The internal battery is excellent, for once actually living up to the manufacturer's claimed lifespan of 15 hours (that's over twice as long as the iPod, kids). Connectivity to the Karma is via USB2 or ethernet - you can plug the player into your network, browse to it, download a Java client _from the player itself_, and use it on any Java-enabled operating system. Best of all (for me at least) - this player is LOUD - about 15mW/channel into 16 ohms. I like loud music, and I can't run this player at the highest volume!

The Karma is one of the first players to add support for Ogg Vorbis (often just called Ogg) and FLAC files, in addition to standard MP3 and Windows media formats. Ogg and FLAC are free, open source formats - Ogg offers better quality music files with smaller file sizes than mp3, and FLAC is the audiophiles choice - a completely lossless compression format. Another benefit is that both formats will play gaplessly on the Karma - great for live or mix albums. No other portable player supports good gapless playback. None.

Included in the box is a pair of good quality headphones (Sennheiser MX300s), all the cables you'll need, software, and the all-important dock. The dock acts as a charging station, USB interface to your PC, and also provides dual RCA outputs to connect to your hi-fi - at far better quality than the 1/8" line out to dual RCA leads could ever provide, I may add. The dock is weighty and solid feeling - it wont be pulled over by the weight of cables attached to it. It also lights up blue when the Karma's docked, and can be set to pulse in time with music playing - pointless, but pretty cool :)

When I got my Karma out of the packaging, my first thought was "wow, I can't believe how small it is!" Rio are the first company to be brave enough to break away from the iPod-style "tall rectangular" form factor - I've handled and used iPods, and to me this is a definite success. Some people have claimed that the Karma is too thick, and if you wear extremely tight jeans this may be the case, but at just over an inch it's no porker. It's also very light - only 5.5 oz which puts it a smidgen lighter than the new iPod. It feels solid - I've read some reviews describing it as "flimsy", but I can only imagine they were reviewing pre-release models - this chap feels like it'll last an age. Someone even flushed his down a toilet and it survived! (Please do not try at home ;)

The form factor is very useable - the stick, menu button, and wheel are all easily accessible to the thumb, while your index and middle fingers wrap around naturally to the volume buttons. While the design may appear very right-hand-centric, there’s a menu setting that caters for left-handers by flipping the screen by 180 degrees. Cunning eh?

A hard drive based player can hold many thousands of songs, and so a good navigation system is essential. Rio have obviously put a lot of thought into usability - for example, where competitors will make you scroll through a huge list of artists to get to your treasured ZZ Top collection, the Karma gives you alphabetical "tabs" on the left hand side, subdividing your music into more manageable chunks. The interface is extremely responsive - even when there's music playing, there's no lag between pressing a button and the player responding. It's these little touches that make the player. Want to reorganise your playlist while it's playing, then save it? No problem. Want your songs to play without any gaps? The built-in crossfader will take care of that.

Aside from standard mp3 player functionality (repeat, shuffle, playlists), the Karma has other tricks up its sleeve. First, the Rio DJ feature intelligently constructs playlists for you from various criteria - genres, years, most or least played songs etc - this is a great way to hear songs you wouldn't have thought to queue up right now. The Karma also provides the best equaliser I've ever seen on a portable player. You can adjust settings using not only standard bass/treble sliders, EQ presets, or a 5 band parametric equaliser - but you can change the mid-point and width of each band on the equaliser for ultimate customisability!

Last, but far from least, there's an active and friendly community associated with the Karma. Rio engineers are active on the forums to and frequently implement user's suggestions!

And the bad points?

- Update the firmware as soon as you get the player - it fixes some minor bugs, and gives you additional functionality.

- The player doesn't function like a removable hard disk - this makes it a lot faster, but means you have to use the supplied software to transfer (audio or non-audio) files to and from the player.

- No iTunes support

- No built in radio or recording, so if you want these functions, look elsewhere.

If, however, you want a well-priced high-quality player with a wealth of options (particularly for the audiophile), then go for it - you wont be disappointed!