Rating: 
Summary: One of the best
Review: .... It is relatively small and it has a wonderful backlit display. It also has great hacking abilities because all of its information is on the compact flash card (no memory is built in) you can customize the startup screen (to whatever you can imagine or draw)The fm radio is great it has good reception and 15 station presets. Now ask for the software it came with, it was good too, but the headphones werent all that. It can compress songs on your computer from whatever the bitrate to 128,96,64,and 32. Unfortunately it cannot go over 128, which doesnt matter because a 320k song would take up alot of space plus the audio quality isnt much different. When it came to trasfering songs to the card it was fast, assuming all of the songs were at 128, if they werent then it would have to compress them (which longer) but who cares, you dont have to trasfer songs that often. I fit about 30 songs on the card at 96k and the quality is great! dont think so ? then the lyra has a built in graphic equalizer so you can adjust each music channel so it sounds like it playing at 320k. So it poses no problem. Although it takes 2 batteries it is relatively light and it can fit in you jean 5th pocket (the small one on the right). The remote is good and you can adjust the songs by touch alone, it also has a plethora of play options, repeat, repeat 1, shuffle, shuffle repeat, and like 3 others it has a program option too. This is a great mp3 player it it better than the rios because to expand them you must buy thier "backpacks" and a 32mb backpack goes for like 50something whereas a 64mb compact flash goes for the same price. The headphones are a tad thin but who gives great headphones away anyways, I would like it better if they were a little thicker on the padding for my ears but I'll buy a new pair anyways. This is a great player, it converts the mp3 files to mpx but it has extrodinary abilities to expand considering all of the system data is stored on the card so it is also easy to upgrade. ... p.s.- many of you are worried on how loud it plays, turn the graphic equalizer to "custom" and it will pound your ears away!
Rating:
Summary: Simple to use, great sound and performance!
Review: After 5 minutes (i took 5 minutes to install and "study" the pc software) i got my first fantastic play list, sounding reeeeally good and transmitting very fast :) the connection PC-Flashcard is fast (5-7 seconds per song), the directory organization of player's internal software is really great. The Radio Fm system is good, but i must try it better. fantastic!
dav
Rating: 
Summary: NOT an MP3 player!
Review: Be warned! The Lyra 2 is NOT an MP3 player. It requires that you use custom, encrypted MPX files. You CAN NOT drag and drop MP3's to this device, eliminating one of the main advatages of CompactFlash.
Rating: 
Summary: Great product for the price
Review: I basically think that the Lyra is one of the best MP3 players I've owned. I purchased it when it first came out then switched to the Rio (huge disappointment). What I liked about the Lyra is how you could add music to the flash card by clicking and dragging the songs from RealJukebox!! I cannot tell you how disappointed I am now that the upgrade for RealJukebox, which is called RealOne, does not support the Lyra. So far I have been unsuccessful in using MusicMatch to manage the music on the Lyra.
Rating:
Summary: Real One Upgrade No Longer Supports The Lyra
Review: I basically think that the Lyra is one of the best MP3 players I've owned. I purchased it when it first came out then switched to the Rio (huge disappointment). What I liked about the Lyra is how you could add music to the flash card by clicking and dragging the songs from RealJukebox!! I cannot tell you how disappointed I am now that the upgrade for RealJukebox, which is called RealOne, does not support the Lyra. So far I have been unsuccessful in using MusicMatch to manage the music on the Lyra.
Rating: 
Summary: What a piece of crud!
Review: I bought this player after reasearching it on the internet. 64 MB memory, FM radio, and pretty [inexpensive]. I got it home, used it for one day (!) and the player broke. A button was broken and something went wrong with the firmware inside. Took it back, got a different one. Didn't work when I got it out of the box. Kept getting internal errors. If I were an educated consumer, I would not buy this. Get an mp3 player that WORKS. Not this one...
Rating:
Summary: this thing rules!!!!!!!!!!!
Review: i bought this rca about 2 months ago and it works like a dream. I have Windows xp installed on my system and it works properly as long as u go to lyrazone.com and update ur drivers and installing software. It works like a dream if you have Windows media player and you convert your music files into wma format then you can at least fit 25 songs on it. I love the remote, it works best when you are jogging or something. Im telling you this is the best mp3 player out there. It has great sound, performance and it has the look! buy it!
Rating:
Summary: RCA Knows Audio...
Review: I Got this one at Radio Shack, for $..., it was listed at $.... ... deal, and yes I am talking about the 64 meg. The one bad review I have seen of this device on this website seems to be coming from some nitpicker, who can not discern between, the red and green light at the intersection, I find people often have strong opinions on topics they "know" little about. The deal with his gripe, let me say that 128k BRS is not just fine it is excellent for good quality audio, if one needs it any better they would stick with WAV's now wouldn't they? Part of the reason for having a Mp3 player is the understanding that you will be giving up the precious bit of sound quality "barely discernable quality" in return for no skipping, no more wasted CDR's, and all the other advantages that solid state music provides. The Software they provide does seem to be the only encoder that will allow a Mp3 to be put on the card, if you try and place it directly on the card it will play the digital sub harmonics as best it can, but it's like calling a fax, and expecting that to be a voice. It has a bright backlight screen, simple interface, Duracell, batt., street style Ephones, cord mounted volume and track selector with a shirt clip, oh yesss even a car adapter. I wanted a Lyra when they first came out, but at the time I was too poor, so I settled for a RCA cd player. It served me well but 20 burned cd's and two pairs of Hphones later, it was time for a change, this is it. If you jog, workout whatever, don't screw with cd players and all their false promise's of anti skip B.S. fact is mechanical action (that is to say motor spinning a optical disk) will fail under the most mediocre conditions. This will not.
Rating:
Summary: Great product for the price
Review: I purchased mine ..., and was very happy with it from day one. After installing MusicMatch Plus (already had the basic version, but software included upgrades you to the Plus version for free), I bagan to download MP3's from the internet. My first problem was a strange hissing or ringing noise on some songs, but I soon discovered this was only on those ripped from CD's using Easy CD Creator. When I used MusicMatch to rip, the noise was gone. The sound is excellent - comparable to CD at 128 bitrate. My husband was satisfied with the 64 bitrate, allowing more music on the 64MB card. Downloading even 128MB of music to a CF card took only minutes on my computer (WindowsME), not 45 minutes for half of that as one person said (computer problem!) And the included CF card reader is also useful if you have a digital camera utilizing this media type. The only problem I had was when someone accidentally sat on my player, and the forward button got stuck down.... So I decided to fix it myself, and removed the little piece of brass that activated the forward button, stuck in the down position. It still works, I just can't use the forward button, so I can't use the radio or skip forward a song.
Rating:
Summary: DON'T WASTE YOUR MONEY!!! - READ THIS REVIEW FIRST!!!
Review: I purchased the Lyra2 and promptly returned it.
When it came, I installed the software (that you have to use to download mp3s to this player) and found that is was converting all my 192kbps mp3s to 128kbps!!! I was very frustrated because converting an already compressed mp3 to an even lower bitrate is degrading the sound quality dramatically! I called RCA... which they don't make easy... and they told me that I would have to contact MusicMatch and RealPlayer to find out how to disable that conversion in their software. After spending all day trying to contact them by phone (which was even more difficult than reaching RCA!) and getting transferred from one tech to the next that didn't know how to stop this conversion, one of the MusicMatch techs asked me if the Lyra2 could even play mp3s over 128kbps? I thought he was insane! I called RCA again and they confirmed it... THE LYRA2 IS LIMITED TO 128KBPS!!! What a rip-off!!! I went back over all RCA's documentation, their website, FAQ's, and even Amazon's very thorough Tech Specs, and NOWHERE does RCA disclose this!!! NOWHERE... not even in their own documentation!
Their techs didn't even tell me until I asked them point blank! I was so disappointed because it seemed really well built and had a really cool backlit display! Because it uses CompactFlash, you're only storage limit is the size of your card (unlike players with built-in memory or that use SmartMedia). Sadly, the cool design of the Lyra2 hardware is NOT worth the
senseless and unnecessary compromise of sound quality. RCA... if you're listening... step into the 21st century!
If you can't make a player that plays an mp3 file over 128kbps, don't bother!
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