Rating: 
Summary: stinks - beware
Review: My unit skipped continuously when playing MP3 cds even when COMPLETELY STATIONARY. Some CDs were more affected than others, but they all skipped no matter what bitrate or CD format. I contacted customer support, but they have yet to reply after almost a week. Some reviewers said that the firmware upgrade fixed their problems with skipping, but it did not work for me. The player seems to be genuinely unupgradeable as Rio claims. The player regarded the upgrade CDs with much interest and spun back and forth for some time, but it had no effect and the player still [stinks]. It almost works tolerably well as a simple audio CD player, but I could get a better one... I got a Koss car kit as some reviewers suggested, but the cigarette adapter did not function either. BEWARE. There are SERIOUS quality control problems with this company.
Rating: 
Summary: Riovolt
Review: So far I like it. It is light, doesn't skip, and sounds great. For [the price]this is a very nice buy, highly recomended.
Rating:
Summary: Very Good Player
Review: I got this CD player for my birthday and have been very satisfied with the results. The player loads fast, has a good set of equilizers, and looks pretty cool, although it might be a tad bit bigger than regular CD players. The neatest feature I found was after the song loads, the CD will stop spinning, yet you can still pause or fast forward through the song. Also while the Cd has stopped, you can still look through your entire collection, which can be nearly 200 songs in mp3 format, or even more in wma (Windows Media Application)!
Rating: 
Summary: Best MP3 CD Player Ever...
Review: Got gigs of mp3s on your computer? Don't want to lug your paperweight to the beach or party? Portable 32/64 Meg mp3 players too expensive (and tiny)? Get this portable MP3/CD player. You can fit 150+ mp3s onto a CD-R or CDRW, that's about 12 hours of audio.PROS:
*Large LCD screen displays Artist - Songtitle info and heirarchy of folders, no need for guessing.
*No complicated software to install.
*Easy to use with spaced-apart buttons unlike those teenie mp3 portable players. *Plays CDRW media flawlessly especially overburned discs.
*Choice of battery power or DC adapter power
*Jaw dropping 2-minute anti-skip protection is great for joggers (or racers =)) CONS:
*Batteries/adapter not included
*car-adapter not included
*need a CD burner, but hey you probably got one already!
*bit pricey for a mp3/cd player
Look at the bright side, some of those 32 meg mp3 portable players cost more than this unit, they only fit approximately 8 songs.
Try to avoid those cheap...mp3/cd players... you get what you pay for. -Thank you for reading- ...
Rating:
Summary: The search is over. I've found my CD/MP3 player.
Review: Wow, I didn't know my mp3's can sound so good. Up until now I've been listening to my mp3s mostly on my computer and on my flash memory mp3 player. I've tried several other CD/Mp3 players before but I thought my mp3s sounded mediocre compared to my CDs. After reading the mostly positive reviews here I decided to give this thing a try. Although I see many posts complaining about the skipping but that isn't too important to me since I am not planning to jog around town with it. After listening to this player I was blown away. It's as if all my mp3s came to life. Highs are crystal clear and lows are solid and punchy whereas before everything sounded muddy and lack any details. I connected it up to my home stereo and switch back and forth between this and my home CD player and I can't tell the difference between my mp3s and my CDs. Also I can not hear any of the annoying background hiss that commonly plague most lesser portable players. I have been using this player for almost a week now and am very happy with it. However I do have some complaints. First the size of the LCD screen is a little misleading. When I first looked at it at the store I thought wow that's the biggest screen I've seen on a portable player, it must display tons of info. But of course it only has 2 lines of text that display the track number, elapsed time, title and artist. I agree with everyone here that the little dancing figure is annoying. They could've added another line of text that display more of the tag and directory info and bitrate. Instead, the silly figures make it look like some cheap children's toy. The battery cover is a joke. It doesn't click into place when closed. It will slide open at the slightest touch. And then there's the flimsy feel of the control buttons. My little neice's toys have buttons that feel better than this. Despite all these shortcomings, I still think this player is a winner because it sounds so good and easy to use and very upgradable. And Judging from all these firmware upgrade versions, you can tell that Rio cares and stands behind it's products. And that's really the bottom line for me. 5 stars.
Rating: 
Summary: 4 stars ONLY if you perform the Firmware Upgrade Hack
Review: I've been using this player for 3 days now. I will separate my review into Pre-Upgrade and Post Upgrade. Pre-Upgrade
The CD takes a while to load, almost 10 seconds. That can get annoying. Also, as you change songs, it takes 4 seconds to load the song which also got to me after a while. As for anti shock, it skipped for me in certain situations. If you just shake it, it won't skip but when I took a stroll it skipped a few times. If you rotate it upside down and back, it will skip. It doesn't even save your previous EQ settings and playback settings (Shuffle, Repeat) and you have to keep setting it. Combined, with slow song loading times, I start to regret purchasing this product and not the SP250. Post Upgrade
I burned another CD with the hacked firmware and plopped it into the player. It took about 5 seconds now to load the MP3 CD. Now it only takes 2 seconds to switch between song. And I'm happy to inform it has never skipped once for me yet. I noticed the CD stops spinning after the song plays for 10+ seconds, I guess it's starting to really use the Antishock and store the song into memory and also save energy. It never did this before the upgrade and constantly spinned the CD. It also now saves my previous settings. I'm very please with the performance of the player now that it's been upgraded. I wish the load times could be even almost instantaneous but CD players can't even do that yet. Other than that, I wish they could improve the aesthetics of the player. The pictures look nicer. I can't recommend this player unless you are going to upgrade the firmware. The player performs horribly unless you do the upgrade. With the upgrade, this player is a real gem and at a very cheap cost.
Rating: 
Summary: I returned it after 14 days' use
Review: I decided to buy a cd/mp3 player when their prices fell nicely ... After studying some technical details I chose the SP 90, which had several promising features, including:
- nice design
- ear-in headphones with very long cord
- good battery life
- mp3 id tag recognition However, in the course of using it I experienced major problems with playing not only the mp3 discs but even the regular audio ones. The player was skipping and stopping even when sitting on my desk with full batteries. It happened several times so I returned it to the store with no problems but I lost my trust for the Sonicblue and I bought an Aiwa ... I can also add that my experience with mp3 discs does not confirm 15 hour battery life, but rather 8-10 hours. Also, the ear-in headphones became annoying, kind of painful to my ears. Lastly, the design of the control buttons could be better so that you could recognize them by the touch, without looking. The buttons lack some marks on the surface, and are too small in general.
Rating:
Summary: super handy!
Review: Ive played around w/ this thing for bout an hour. Its pretty dang good, and does everything it says it does... Plus more! The little firmware hack works great, took only about 10 seconds to update. Controls take a bit to get used to, but once u get the hang of it, it is very easy to get to the song you want. Just make sure you label your ID3 tags on your mp3s correctly before burning! Also it helps if u have your favorite artists have their own directory on the cd, like ive done. The new playlist option also helps, but requires you to stop the song curretnly playin to load up a list. The sound through my Koss PortaPros is great; customizeable Bass AND Treble boost, and it also lets u fool around w/ Bass/Treble eq bands. Also make sure you turn off the the File Ext. option in Display options, it frees up some precious letter spaces to read the name of the songtitles. I agree the little dancing things on the bottom is annoying and it would have been much better to have a third line of text there. That and the fact that thers only about 12 characters of text per line(2 lines) to read songtitles and navigate, is the only reason i give it 4 stars instead of 5. You can change the speed how fast you can FF and RW within songs, which is pretty cool. Also has the feature of fading into a song, when you start up a song. Most options you can enable or disable. Loading times are quite bearable after firmware upgrade. The earphones arent bad at all, its actually very different what i seen on Rio's site. It looks more like the ones that comes w/ Sp-100.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent MP3 Player, I did upgrade too
Review: Well I guess it's my turn for a review. I purchased this for... from Amazon.... I mainly wanted it for the mp3 feature.... I particularly did not like the head phones; they were average to say the least. The sp90 could use more bass. It has a preset bass level, but it's useless. I decided to upgrade the firmware to the sp100 2.10 version just for the heck of it. I really didn't experience problems w/ mine before doing it. I experimented a little and shook it to see how much it would skip and compared it after I upgraded the firmware. I put the upgrade disc in and it took maybe 10-15 seconds to upgrade. I immediately place a cd in and started shaking and doing the same thing I did w/ the player when the original firmware was installed. Believe it or not, it only skipped once compared to it skipping everytime from that height w/ the original firmware; I dropped it about 3.5 feet onto my bed. I'm happy w/ my purchase, especially for the price I paid.... Just burn the image on cd and insert the disc in the player. *Note, try this at your own risk, I won't be held liable; I'm just helping out. I'm told it already worked for a couple of people I sent it to. File size is 335kb. I hope this helps. Please vote on this so that other people can benefit.
Rating:
Summary: THIS THING IS AWESOME!!!
Review: 2 words... SUPER COOL! If you are looking for a MP3/WMA/CDA CD player and don't want to spend a fortune, then this is the one! By the way, I discovered that this thing also plays ASF files, and as some folks know that means you can encode with whatever codec you want including DivX. I don't know what others are talking about as far as skipping, I can't get mine to skip. I didn't bother to do the SP-100 upgrade hack as I don't see any reason to. This unit will play MP3/WMA/ASF from discs with mixed files and directories. CD-RW is fully supported. Also, CD's that are still "open" are supported, so if you are using a CD-RW and adding files to it everyday for instance, that won't be a problem.
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