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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 don't particularly like Sonic Blue as a company -- they seem to have gobbled up and ruined a lot of good product lines, but I've used the Empeg before (which they bought), and own two Rio Receivers. (Which seem to be based on the Empeg technology, from the looks of the software running on them).
I love the Rio Receivers. I have two of them -- one in the living room, and one in my bedroom, streaming music from a Linux server running JReceiver. I can access all my MP3's, as well as listen to streaming music sources over the net on my stereo with a minimum of hassle.
Although a lot of the college students on here (or unemployed ex dot com people) have time to build one off solutions, for $1500, these are a good buy for those of us who unfortunately don't have time available to custom build solutions. For $99, the Rio Receivers were a no-brainer, I just wish I had bought a couple more.
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..
Here are the features of the box:
* Digitally records and stores your entire music collection in a single location.
* Powerful 40 GB hard drive can store more than 650 CDs or 6,500 individual songs.
* Write standard audio CDs or MP3 data CDs using the integrated CD-RW drive.
* Move your MP3 music collection off of the PC and into the living room (use either a network connection or USB to transfer MP3's from your PC to your Rio Central).
* Create an unlimited number of customized playlists based on personal style, taste, or mood. Or, let the Rio Audio Center determine what you want to hear based on your listening habits.
* Large display, intuitive interface and advanced search features make it easy to find the music you want instantly.
* Frees your home of bulky CD collections and saves you from the hassle of searching through stacks of CDs to find a favorite song or album.
* Shares music with Rio portables via convenient USB ports in front and back of unit.
* Encodes at a bitrate of up to 320 kbps for high-performance digital sound quality. Provides an optional, lower bitrate encoding option for downloading to portables.
* Quickly record digital audio files from your personal CD collection. Just load a disc and Rio does the rest.
* CDs are automatically cataloged as they are recorded. Artist, album, song title, and other relevant information is instantly assigned to each file to make future searches quick & easy. Built-in 56 kbps modem will dial out to retrieve information from the Internet if necessary.
* Built in 10 mbps home PNA connection for streaming music to one or more Rio Receivers.
* Supports common audio formats like MP3 and WMA, and can be upgraded to emerging digital standards so your home audio system is always up-to-date.
* Engineered to the highest quality standards with stereo RCA and optical outputs.
now, here is what the comments will be:
1) I can do the same thing for $xxx with xxx hardware and linux
2) this is cool, but no one will buy it
3) how long will it be till it runs linux...
4) etc. use your imagination.
I for one, think it is a very nice looking box. People buying this probably are not too concerned with money, and it would be a VERY nice looking addition to my home stereo. I myself can not afford it, but it looks like they put a lot of effort into making it look nice and fit in with the rest of your stereo equipment.
true, you can do the same thing with a computer, but sometimes that just doesn't matter.
Moon Macrosystems. Sun's biggest competitor.
This geek just wants a front end to my own MP3 server. The audiotron is sweet because it gives you teh slick interface and DAC on top of an Ethernet port. That way I can maintain my stuff on my server that will house other stuff as well. I'd rather have all my home files (MP3s, movies, etc included) one one central server instead of having to maintain a bunch of smaller servers throughout. Maybe thats just me, but that is why teh Audiotron or units like it win me over everytime.
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> but one had a problem (Blink 182's Dude Ranch).
there you go -
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.
Surely it would be more economical and practical to connect a video output to one's television, like the Kenwood Entré does. You could program/navigate it using the remote control instead of having to stand right in front of it, and the box would be half the height to boot.
Then you have to deal with putting together a good UI for it - which is no trivial task.
It's like TiVO - sure you can hack together some perl scripts in linux to turn on your capture card every tuesday at 8:00 on channel 9 but it's just not as aethstically pleasing.
I for one would rather pay for a nice interface and design then spend nearly the same amount for a hacked-together solution.
The device offers, according to the linked page, "Built in 10 mbps homePNA connection for streaming music to one or more Rio Receivers."
Nice, but practically speaking a waste. Better to replace the Ethernet card with a low-power FM transmitter, like most car CD jukeboxes do, so that you can pick it up from any radio in your house. The only use for homePNA would be to sell the Rio Receivers, but this $1500 device would be infinitely more valuable if I didn't have to spend more money to get remote listening.
It doesn't, in fact, have an FTP server. There is a Windows program supplied for storing existing MP3s onto it; this access can be password-protected.
What bitrate does it rip at?
You get to choose, off a menu. By default it rips twice, once at high bit-rate for playback, once at low bit-rate for downloading to portables.
Peter
I can feed my own shoes and tie myself!
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If you click the link and look at the ad in the lower left corner it says, "Free RioReciever plus $100 off when you buy the RioCentral". Since the reciever rocks more than the Central (it has ethernet) then this deal might actually make it worth getting. I get the whole enchilada for $1400. Need to cash in 401k... ;)
ASCII tastes bad dude.
Binary it is then.
See. The /. subscriptions do work. Taco has enough money to get married and still purchase a $1500 toy.
And it's built on Linux- a USB keyboard is all you need to get to a command line!
Well, hey, I had reservations about dropping twice the current price of my iMac on something with less expandability, less functionality, less drive space, and no real network connection - but if it runs Linux, well, that changes everything.
*cough*
Yes, I'm being sarcastic. If it's not something designed as a general purpose computer, I don't even _want_ to know what OS is on it.
--saint
Does it play .mid files? You know how many months of .mid files fit inside 40GB?
.mid, .mod, .xm, and .s3m files, 2400 BPS upstream both ways...
Kids today, it's MP3 this, MP3 that. Back in my day, we downloaded
And we liked it!
And you try and tell the young people today that... and they won't believe ya'.
The source is available but the link is wrong. Try ftp://ftp.diamondmm.com/pub/rio/radac/
Peter
Do you have any idea what underlying protocol this software uses?
It's more-or-less the same as the empeg-car synchronise protocol, for which GPL source is available (search for "emptool"). There is already a rather nifty Java re-implementation (www.jempeg.org), which I believe can (or soon will) synchronise to Rio Centrals just as well as to empeg-cars.
Peter
Here's what I've got going at home:
Beside the TV/entertainment centre/etc. is a PII-300, running Win2K, picked up from a surplus shop locally for under $100. It is headless--there's no monitor or keyboard. There's an SB Live 128 in there with the line-level output signal going to the stereo system and the line-level ins coming from the TV's extra line-level audio outs. Of course, it has a network card in it and I administer it with VNC.
I can play MP3s from any machine on the home network. Furthermore, I run the ShoutCast server on the box so I can listen to TV from other rooms in the house (handy when I have to be on the dev machine in the bedroom but a game is on). With the addition of a bit more technology (a AllInWonder card or somesuch), I could have some snazzy video caps too.
Now all of this, including the cards, cost just under $200. Please tell me, a geek, why I could go buy the item costing over seven times what I put together my box for? I'm not dissing it; I'm just saying that on my own, I can get a much more flexible system that I control and configure. Sorry, Rio, nice idea, but a little too expensive for this humble driver writer.
Karma: Excellent Birds (mostly as a result of listening to Laurie Anderson)
So you are willing to order a $40 network adapter, but you don't want to go out and buy a few CDRs to test the burning function?
hmph.
room101 -- how much can you stand before they break you?
(they always break you eventually)
Look for them on clearance.. I bought mine from Best Buy for $149 about 6 months ago.
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
*DOH* I've asked the web guys to fix this ASAP.
The source also ships with the product on CD, and our stuff is passed back into the ARM Linux chain from time to time so most of it is in the standard distribution by now.
-- Freddie Starr ate my empeg
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
All mp3 decoders are not created equal and I sure wish reviewers would dig a little deeper. If they go beyond navigation and I/O features and cover audio quality, it's typically only to mention background hum or hiss or a wimpy headphone amplifier.
mp3 at high bitrates created with a competent encoder (LAME is one) can sound pretty good. Decoding with cheap 16 bit DSPs such as the TMS320C54x used in the Rio One is hard to do-- you have to watch out for error accumulation (e.g. please round to zero instead of simply truncating).
If you don't believe me that decoders differ, consider these tests of PC decoders. Unfortunately, no one seems to do such detailed testing on embedded decoders.
I'm giving my Rio One to my nephew who will be so thrilled to have it that if he hears the high-frequency errors on playback of middlin' bitrates (192kbps), he probably won't mind.
I don't know what I'm going to replace it with, though. I know I shouldn't expect much out of a $80 player powered from on AA cell, but there's no guarantee that a $400 Rio Riot or iPod will be glitch-free: they might have spent the whole power and cost budget on LCDs, hard drives and amortizing development.
A StrongARM-based PocketPC might be the answer- plenty of horsepower to run less compromised 16 bit decoder or even a 24 bit or floating point one. It should also be able to decode ogg vorbis....
By the way, instead of reasonable speakers, I'm using a good pair of headphones. Much more bang for the buck when it comes to revealing audio defects, though the Sonys tend to be a bit shrill (well the older V6s that I have) for long-term listening. These are the same model we used when I was at E-mu for all normal testing. The only thing more revealing was the elements from a good pair of Sennheisers in a set of noise protection muffs to cut background noise by 23dB. Also, some of the ATC guys have Grado electrostatics.
This "MP3 stereo component" obsession has gotten out of hand. I know someone who specializes in OCD. Please, for the sake of the /. community, I think Cmdr Taco needs to seek help dealing with this issue.
What's the first thing you do with a 40 gig MP3 player?
:)
In Canada, you pay $840 extra.
WhatEVA
Turtle Beach is not only still producing the Audiotron, but still supporting it via addition of new features.
The last month has seen the addition of a full API to go with the web interface and Shoutcast streaming ability. AT users also can join a mailing list that enables them to help Turtle Beach develop new features. In short, it's probably the BEST supported piece of hardware I've got.
It's like they build this equipment just so they can get it on the streets before Congress passes legislation to ban it.
I'm a 2000 man.
An Emerson CD/MP3 player. A little portable unit that is only slightly larger than a standard portable CD player, has line out to connect to external speakers/stereo systems, reads Mp3s from a CD and handles subdirectories quite well, programmable playback sequence, all the standard functions of portable CD players. It may not have all the cool features of the mentioned box, but at 85 bucks you get a good solid hand held CD/Mp3 player that can be plugged into the wall with the included AC adapter, and plugged into your stereo system with the line out jack. Far better price/performance ratio than just about any Mp3 player, and more than enough for the average persons needs. It even comes with decent(though not outstanging) headphones, a first in all the portable cd player purchases I've made. For general use, I wouldn't recommend a different model Mp3 or portable CD player. Especially if you have a CD burner... its wonderful. Only failing is it chews through batteries pretty quickly, especially when playing Mp3s. Even so, the versatility it offers over a normal flash memory Mp3 player, or a portable CD player, and plug in the wall stay put units, makes it WELL worth the 85 dollars US I paid for it at my local Kmart(MILFORD IS STAYING OPEN!!!! YAYYY!!!!)
So, just grab the source and we can build our own for $500! Then market ot for $800. Sounds like a plan.
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!
why pay that much for something so small?
Aesthetics are worth paying for to some people. I'm planning on moving the lion's share of my computer gear either into the attic or the basement when I buy a house, and just keeping one of those new iMacs around (or maybe a laptop) to tap into it via a wireless network.
The main advantage? I don't have to look at piles of beige metal in the spare bedroom, which is the situation I'm in now.
--saint
My question is, why didn't they merge this with their ReplayTV line?
How much more could it have cost to combine the TV and music?
You can get an iMac with 40 gigs and a CD-RW drive.
For $1500, you can get an iMac with 40 gigs and a CD-RW/DVD drive.
The Macs include 10Mhz/100Mhz ethernet, USB, Firewire, iTunes, iMovie, and iPhoto software.
Sorry, this device just doesn't flip my switch.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
My question is, does anyone have any suggestions for *software* to do something like this?
Sure. Download uICE. It supports various infrared controllers such as the IRMan. You can use any infrared remote to control it (your VCR's remote, whatever). Just teach the IR codes to the software and tell it what you want it to do. I use it with an AMX touchscreen linked to an AMX master controller. The master controller sends 6 character strings out one of it's 6 serial ports into one of my server's 10 serial ports. uICE receives those strings and passes control on to Winamp. End result? I can control all functions of Winamp from my living room. The AMX equipment also powers up my audio equipment and switches to the right input when I fire up Winamp from the touchscreen...
-Ryan, with the unoriginal sig
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(you're not the only one who is into cut and paste)