Slashdot Mirror
Hardware Review: Rio Central
I'll be frank- I was excited to see this box. A 40 gig drive makes this thing on the right side of the space curve since it means I can store a large enough portion of my CDs to make it useful. Of course as anyone who has designed or even used a large scale MP3 player knows, with great gobs of disk space comes the burden of attempting to create a UI to do manage great gobs of music.
What's the first thing you do with a 40 gig MP3 player? You plug it in and start ripping CDs. The unit is physically nice looking- it seems a bit big, but most of that is the large screen (which is unfortunately kind of dim). It has USB ports on the front and back. Optical audio connection is available but I tested it with standard RCAs plugged into the stereo in my office since I was familiar with the audio quality of this system having been listening to both CDs and MP3s for a long time here.
The box has a copy of a big chunk of CDDB on it, so it doesn't really need net access to rip a lot of CDs. However it does have a modem port, and an HPNA network connection for people using phone lines in their house as a sort of poor mans ethernet. I'm seeing a lot of consumer electronics with HPNA connections and it looks like a good compromise. Unfortunately the unit doesn't have a built in ethernet adapter, and it only supports a handful of USB ethernet adapters, so I had to order one in order to get this thing on my office network (to review the Rio Reciever which is a seperate device: review forthcoming).
Allright with all of that out of the way, it was time to rip a CD. The drive tray is white which is a minor nitpick, but it really is a sore thumb on the smooth looking black case. But hey, thats just my anal retentive side. Ripping CDs is trivially easy: stick it in and confirm the title. I ripped several discs without trouble (Gorillaz, Daft Punk, Ben Folds), but one had a problem (Blink 182's Dude Ranch). It just hung and there wasn't much I could do about it except eject.
Playback and navigation is a mixed bag. Doing common operations is pretty easy but constructing elaborate playlists is obviously going to be more work. Several nifty random options exist, like playing your most played tracks, or your least played tracks instead of going purely random. Very cool. I will say that this has the best UI of any stereo component MP3 player I've seen, but you need to get up close to do complicated stuff just to read the screen.
The audiotron allows a web interface. The ZapStation lets you use the TV to control playlists. Both devices have shortcomings, but at least there are ways to control your playlist without pulling your ass out of the recliner. The Rio's Remote and screen just don't cut it from more than 6-8 feet away.
The gee whiz stuff that is worth mentioning- having a hard drive in your stereo adds that plesant whirring sound. I'm sure that bugs people besides me. You probably won't notice it at a reasonable distance, but its there. The audio fidelity on the whole is as good as can be expected. We all know what MP3 encoding does to your tunes if you have a reasonable speakers. There are also silly little visualization things on the screen if you are into that. Its fun, but obviously its not the reason someone would buy this thing ;) But I know people who buy an EQ just to have the fancy lights in their stereo, so obviously some people dig it.
For those of you who are interested in getting under the hood, throwing in larger hard drives should be relatively easy. And with 100 gig drives at $200, you could really make this thing sing. If you plug a USB keyboard in, you can ease navigation in the UI... or hit ctrl-alt-delete, and suddenly the Rio Central's screen gives you an honest to god Linux Shell Prompt. There are a few games too, but thats just a nifty bonus, you won't be spending any quality time on them.
Getting audio onto the box through methods other than ripping CDs (or letting it read MP3s off a CDR) is tougher. The box has FTP, so getting MP3s onto the hard drive is easy... a little command line program to import a directory of MP3s would be swell. There's also an open source java application under development called jempeg which should eventually support the Central since it is based on the Empeg car player. That will Greatly ease the annoying process of getting your gigs of existing tracks onto the box.
There are a few other features that I didnt' really test. You can burn CDs or feed a few different MP3 portables. The UI to do this is pretty simple but I didn't have any CDRs or a portable MP3 player to test it out with.
Summary: Ethernet should be built in. Buying a $40 adapter for a $1500 unit is just silly considering the target audience for this thing. At $500-$750 the Rio Central would be a much easier recommendation. Maybe $500, and you add your own hard drive. But I know full well that such a thing currently isn't economically possible for a vendor. I still feel like the home MP3 player is over priced and can't imagine it catching on until it gets a bit closer to the price of big CD changer. But in terms of usability, this is the best one I've tested yet, and the standard 40G hard drive is probably enough for most people.
Coming Soon: the review of the Rio Reciever- this little baby connects over your network to the Rio Central and brings audio to any room you have an ethernet connection. This is what makes the Rio Central stand out. But you'll have to wait a few days to read about it here ;)
C'mon, it's a review of a $1500 piece of hardware that does what an $800 computer can do if you give it a good sound card and a burner. Give me reasons why it should be bought!
I still don't understand why people would buy these things. You already (well, should!) have plenty of space on a PC in your home. You can already rip mp3s. The only thing is you can't cue them up on a stereo component.
Get an Audiotron for $199 or so, and you're done. Use your existing collection. Why waste money..
That is exactly what hit me as I got through this article - does the same stuff, with a better interface and ethernet built-in. You could probably play games on 'em, too.
For a new component? Hell no. Think about it: you're paying as much for the service and the software as you are for the box itself. And though you can say very easily that you could find quality ripping, encoding and navigation software and add that to your $800 box, the fact is it still won't have the correct footprint, decent enough optical out, clean enough analogue out, a nice resolution mini monitor or a decent controller.
What a lot of people don't understand is that any idiot can toss together a cheap computer. Making a cheap computer into a great machine takes good software and an eye for detail -- what will cause a problem where, what will be unreliable and unsupportable in three months, what will cause dependencies that aren't intuitive. Shit, when I went Athlon I found out after installing the mobo and chip that both my NIC and my sound card were incompatible...meaning three hours of downtime while I shlepped to the local hardware emporium. That's why people buy boxes from Apple, SGI, Sun Cobalt, Snap, F5 and RADware...you don't have to hack anything to get them to work.
I figure the software that went into this machine took at least as much care as my Sun Cobalt webserver ($1900 for similar power), plus it's got that sweet little display. $1500 may be a lot for a computer -- but for this device, it's worth it and when the price drops in two or three months it'll be even more worth it.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
In some strange twist, it's actually not just you; it's also the company you mention in your sig. Centralized storage and intelligence will be the future of home computing, and instead of trying to make expensive, do-everything boxes, people will make simple cheap devices that hook into the PC.
-- Patience is a virtue, but impatience is an art.