Slashdot Mirror
Rio Karma 20GB Reviewed
asv108 writes "The Rio Karma has been out on the market for over a month now with very little mainstream press. Slashdot covered the product announcement back in August for one of the first mainstream devices that supports OGG and FLAC playback. I've posted a little review of the 20 GB Rio Karma, which, besides OGG/FLAC/MP3/WMA playback, has a great little dock that syncs the player via ethernet. One little known gem is that this player comes with java-based software that allows users to download the software directly from the player via any browser and sync the Karma with Linux, Mac OS X, and any other OS that Java runs on."
But can't they make it less ugly?
I know everyone is trying to make these as small and unobtrusive as possible, but this little guy is a little too small and too oddly-shaped (a square???) to be comfortably used.
What would be nice would be a set of bluetooth headphones so that a wire from my pocket to my ear wasn't necessary.
Patents and royalties.
Believe me there are headphones where you can tell the difference. The $300 Etymotic ER-4P headphones are more than portable enough for a portable player and produce better sound than all but maybe a half dozen (no exaggeration) full size headphone models. In fact for regular stereo audio (i.e. not surround sound), a good pair of headphones is almost guaranteed to sound better than the same amount of money spent on speakers, because speakers have to contend with reflection noise off your walls.
So I'd say you have it backwards -- computer listening doesn't really benefit much from lossless audio, but headphone listening sure can.
Even if you don't feel like spending $300 on headphones, there are still many lesser headphones for which FLAC is worthwhile. Don't judge headphone quality based on the cheap headphones included with the player.