5-band parametic equalizer with pre-sets
Reviews (241)
Most of what you need and nothing you don't
Produced by Digital Networks North America (DNNA) (sister company to Marantz Audio), the Rio Karma, although aging, has still not lost its edge on the competition. While other companies are trying to cram as many new features into their MP3 players such as tuner recorders, diaries, calendars and games, the Rio Karma sticks to the basics and does them extremely well.
In the tidy package you get the player obviously, a substantial pair of Sennheiser MX300 ear buds, the drivers CD and a rather nifty dock.
The Rio Karma itself is shaped rather oddly. It's short and rather squat, featuring none of the aluminum or acrylic that is so often found in its competitors. Reminiscent of the old style minidisk players that used AA batteries, the Rio Karma is an all plastic and rubber handle affair, featuring a large clear plastic front plate that is prone to being scratched. Although not the most attractive MP3 player on the market at the moment, this is not a big detraction from the overall package; it's unlikely you will be framing any MP3 player as a work of art.
Build wise, although it feels sturdy, durability is in fact a drawback with the Rio Karma. The plastic casing, possesses very little to hold it together apart from tabs (which you can see if you pry it open, although it's not recommended) and tends to fall apart from time to time after the inevitable dropping of it occurs. However, it has been noted that the Rio Karma is prone to hard-drive failures, don't panic too much, this often doesn't corrupt files, all you need to do is hard reset it, this is more of an annoyance.
The Rio Karma despite its bulky appearance fits snugly into the hand with a rubber handle to grip onto. The combination of the brightly colored red joystick control, jog wheel and dedicated menu button is within easy reach of the thumb and the power, volume and hold buttons are also within easy reach of all other fingers. One concern, however, is the ease of which the joystick and jog wheel are moved so that during play, if it is not on hold it often switches tracks of skips forwards or backwards. This design was mainly built for a right handed user but, there is a left-handed mode for those who are inclined that way, however, it ends up being horribly useless with the controls in awkward positions.
The connectors on the body include a mini USB 2.0 connector, obviously to connect to the PC for music transference, a proprietary connector for the dock (included), a DC power connector that recharges the non-replaceable Li-Ion battery and a headphone jack which has the option of an inline remote. Strangely enough, DNNA never released an inline remote to compliment the Rio Karma and, seeing how long it has been on the market for, probably never will.
The dock that has been included is surprisingly handy as well as being rather "funky", allowing users to easily plug the Rio Karma in for simultaneous charging and transferal without the need for constantly connecting via wires. It features RCA line-out connectors (yes, you can connect them to an amp), a power connector, another mini-USB 2.0 connector and strangely enough, an Ethernet port. This was a stroke of genius on DNNA's part as it allowed the Rio Karma to connect to any TCP/IP based network, enabling sharing of the music to many users (much like Sony's current 20GB network MP3 Player). The funky thing with the dock is that, during charging the dock emits an eerie blue glow, which, while playing music can pulse to the beat.
Getting to the software, unlike most MP3 players nowadays, the Rio Karma doesn't allow use as a mass storage device as its file structure isn't compatible with the normal FAT file structures. Instead, it uses a file format that allows the storage of music identification tags (ID3 tags) and speedy retrieval of them.
The software included is the Rio Music Manager and Rio Taxi, both of which are downloadable free from the DNNA website (no particularly spectacular software inclusions here).
The Rio Music Manager is a simplistic music transferal program that scans the Rio Karma for music and scans your hard-drive for music. Although Music Manager does not possess the wiz bang functions of other programs it is easy to understand and is designed for users to transfer music straight away without the hassles of setting up. Transferal is a simple click and off you go. It's not particularly zippy at 10MB per second but it does the job. Also, some users have found it difficult to transfer music onto the Rio Karma because it can repeatedly not identify itself, simply a problem with the drivers.
Turning the Rio Karma on, the menu was obviously designed with extremely fool proof use in mind. It's practically god's gift to frustrated MP3 audiophiles. It's self-explanatory, it's intuitive, it's quick, it does everything for you and combined with a joystick, you can use a single thumb to scan through 5000 songs which are categorized in several possible ways, and find the exact one in seconds.
During playback the Rio stick is used for pausing or skipping tracks, the scroll wheel to fast forward or rewind. Tapping the menu button will bring up the full menu system or holding it briefly will jump straight to the Play Music option, which allows you to browse by artist, genre, year, etc. Picking Artists will provide a view with letters down the left hand side, with the artists under that letter on the right. You scroll through to pick a letter, and then pick an artist from that letter - for example, L then Led Zeppelin. You'll be given an offer of different albums to play, or the default "Play all tracks" option. Selecting an album will give you the individual tracks or "Play all". If only one album is found, then the player won't waste your time with a choice of one.
Getting past the easy to use interface, the Rio caters for the audio geeks in several ways. Firstly, a full five band equalizer along with a multitude of presets for those who don't know how to use the equalizer, just get there. Secondly, the Rio Karma supports, probably the most file formats in any portable MP3 Player, including MP3, WAV, WMA and for the audiophiles, Ogg Vorbis and FLAC. For those that don't know, WMA support means it can play tracks ripped with Windows Media Player, or tracks bought on-line from every single music store that isn't iTunes. Ogg Vorbis is generally considered as having a higher quality output than MP3 at the same bit rates, and has a firm following in the Open Source community, since unlike MP3 it is unencumbered with patents. And for the high-quality obsessed, FLAC is totally lossless (no CD quality lost) while only taking up half the space that a normal WAV file would take.
Sound quality, although heavily reliant on the type of format being used, using lossless formats, the Rio Karma, while not being particularly bad, is at times unable to handle heavy music, clipping what is outside of its capabilities and creating crackling noises (it has 40 levels of volumes and believe me when I say you wouldn't want it to get any louder). Lighter music tends to be a bit too smooth with the intricacies of some songs such as jazz or orchestral works being glazed over; the difference between the bottom of the frequency range and the top in volume was remarkable. The Rio Karma has a slight bump up in the lower frequencies before leveling out mid range and then quickly falling off towards the higher frequencies. The result is a rather lopsided, bass heavy, slightly muffled sound.
One final feature is Rio DJ. Rio DJ provides some slightly more general playback settings than picking a specific year. For example, you can select all tracks from the 1970's, or for an hour of your top or worst tracks. You can ask for all the tracks transferred onto the player within the last week, or for a simple fifteen minutes of randomly chosen music. Rio DJ also tracks usage and is surprisingly accurate at picking your favorite bands and music.
Rio Music Managers Rio DJ allows you to create custom play lists, and then transfer them to the player as a play list.
Overall, it doesn't have some of the gimmicks of its competitors such as FM Radio or recording, but what you get is a masterful music device, designed specifically for its original use, playback of music. The irreplaceable battery is a cause for slight concern, but Rio HQ in Japan has begun a battery replacement scheme which, hopefully, will soon be available worldwide.
82/100
Pros: Lossless audio codec's, extremely easy to use, 5-band equalizer, intuitive music organization, small and well designed control layout, these are getting cheaper.
Cons: Lack of an inline remote, unattractive, not hugely durable, easy to accidentally press controls, occasional hard-drive failures (more than most), problems with some of the USB drivers, the Rio Music Manager is over simplistic, the sound quality is uneven.
Overall: The cons above are a bit picky (there isn't much to pick with this player) but, the aging Rio Karma manages to hold its flame high above the wind of many other competing MP3 jukeboxes. Very few other players have come to the level that the Rio Karma has reached of pure functionality.
Alternatives: (There are many alternatives in this category, however, the two most popular would be, in my opinion, the iPod and Creative Zen Touch)
iPod: iPod's popularity is warranted, being one of the easiest and most fun to use MP3 players on the market, the click wheel was an innovation on Apple's part, it is easy to see why they are so popular. With billions of accessories and huge support network, beginners to the MP3 world will enjoy this player. However, lacking the ability to support Windows Media Codec's and some other popular codec's as well as the strong protection against music sharing makes this a slight turn off for audio geeks.
Creative Zen Touch: Excellent playback capabilities, Creative who have had a monopoly on the computing audio for some time now, do not let their experience go to waste. The interface and software included may have a higher learning curve than the Rio Karma. This includes many of the gimmicks such as an FM recorder. Surprisingly supports few audio codec's (MP3, WMA) and no lossless codec's, since Creative have had such success in Hi-fidelity computer audio.
Fantastic!!!!
What a GREAT player! Besides a false alarm with cheap headphones recently, it hasn't had a problem since I bought it in July 2004.
Charging and transferring music: I'd say charging takes...probably around 5 hours to fully charge it, from no battery life to full. Battery life is definitely a good 15 hours: it played through a round trip to Maui. Transferring music is a dream - I use Windows Media Audio files, and it's very easy to transfer files directly through the Windows Media Player. (I even found it a little faster than the Rio software that the player comes with, on Windows 2000 and Windows Media Player 9.)
Controls within the player: GREAT organization. Music is organized by Artist, Album, Track, Playlist, Year, and Genre, and then within, say, Artist, it has Artists by each letter, and then you can also view all Artists, organized alphabetically. I didn't find it at first, but you can also make playlists on the player, even while music is playing! My only complaint is that you can't change the order of songs, but I realize that that's probably a lot to ask of a portable MP3 player. Unless you're using very quiet speakers or a song is unusually low volume, the volume definitely goes high enough. Also, you can scroll back and forth through a song, or up and down the list of songs playing without changing the song currently playing, with the scrollbar, in the two different views. All the buttons are very solid feeling, and the Rio stick is easy to use.
Physically, the player IS very solid feeling: I dropped it once, on a tile floor, when it was in its cradle. It stuck the next time I started it up, on the startup screen, but when i restarted it after that, it was just fine. It's a little on the heavy side - but for 20GB of music, which is 4 times my whole music collection.
I can't say anything for the Customer Support, because I haven't had to use it yet!
All in all - I highly recommend it; it's a great value and investment! (And mine was $300!)
Stuck at the "Starting" screen.
My Rio Karma would get stuck at "Starting" screen and the harddisk would start making weird noises. Hard resetting did not help. After doing a lot of googling, it turned out that many people had this same problem and the solution was to whack it hard. I, of course, didn't believe it at first but it worked. Here is how you do it -
1. Turn the player on. It would keep showing "Starting" screen.
2. Whack the player hard on the backside. You might have to do it 3-4 times. I banged it on the floor.
3. The player would restart itself. You don't have to turn it off and on again.
Hope this helps.
Easy and Small
I bought my mp3 player two months ago, and i'm very happy with.
Easy to use and is nice to your eyes, no problems so far.
Karma
I Bought my Roi Karma in june of 2004, and it just died on me in may of 05.bakc around december the scroll wheel got pushed in after i accidently droped it and it landed on the scroll wheel.this didnt really matter because i didnt use it anyway.it still worked fine after that.i was quite careless with it, droping it all of the time walking down the street and it falling on the hard pavement.it survived a good 15-20 drops, but the other day it finaly broke.when i turn it on now it makes noises and feezes on the starting screen.
after using my friends ipods, and using my rio karma, i cant tell a difference in the quality.so if its between the karma and the ipod, DEFFINATLY go with the Karma.it dosent matter if it dosent have a carrying case or how ugly it is, beacause its in your pocket or in you hand most of the time.i listened to my karma all of the time.i would turn it on when i left for school in the morning, set up a long play list to last all day, and turn it off when i got home about 8 hours later.
this is a great buy i would rate it the #1 mp3 player out there.
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Glorified radio.