Getting back to the Rio's spec sheet, readers can see that the signal to noise ratio (95dB) and the overall distortion rate (.01 - .1%) are fairly competitive versus other portable audio format players. The overall battery consumption rate of the Rio is impressive, with a stock alkaline AA battery turning in 10hrs on our continuous music playback tests.
**Rio Performance Tip: Energizer markets a "lithium" version of it's popular AA alkaline battery that allowed the Rio to produce 18 hours of music in our endurance tests. Look in the "photo" section of your local drug store for this higher-priced red colored battery.
One portion of the Rio's spec sheet that didn't jibe with our real world experience was the "10 seconds per 1MB" rating for transferring MP3 songs from your computer to the Rio via a parallel pass through cable. In our test rig, (which is a P2-450 w/128MB of SDRAM) the Rio only needed three to four seconds per megabyte of data to load up the unit. To fill the Rio's entire 32MB of internal memory required just 2.5 minutes.
Speaking of transferring music to the player, let's talk about the software and hardware bundle that Diamond has equipped the unit with.
Diamond lists the bundled materials that the Rio PMP300 package comes with as follows:
- Rio PMP 300 portable MP3 player
- High-quality headphones
- 15-pin cable
- Parallel Port Adapter
Software:
- MusicMatch Jukebox Limited Edition software for converting CD's to an MP3 format.
- CD Music Sampler
Goodnoise: The premier source on the net for high-quality,
downloadable music
MP3.com: Tons of songs from new artists
MP3 songs from MusicMatch and Audio Explosion, also included
The headphones listed above are actually earbuds, the kind that fit snugly in the ear of the listener. They aren't the most expensive earbuds that we've ever heard, nor are they the worst. When compared to the gold plated limited edition Sony earbuds that Sharky Extreme uses for certain audio tests (like this one) there was a noticeable drop off in quality. But for freebies, the earbuds still performed better than most of the low quality pieces that we've seen bundled with other audio units.
