Black Box: Diamond Rio PMP300 Portable Music Player

by Larry Lemm
Summer/Fall 1999

There's nothing TV about the MP3 Internet music format, but for those who have Web-surfing computers hooked to their home entertainment systems it provides a way to download and play high-quality music from the hard drive. Diamond Multimedia's Rio PMP300 Portable Music Player takes the music off the hard drive and places it in the palm of your hand. Use your PC/TV to download MP3 music files from various Web sites. Use your Rio to play the music through headphones while you're jogging or lying on a beach.

No Moving Parts

The Rio is an impressively compact device that is about the size of a pager, roughly 3.5-inches by 2.5-inches and a little more than a half inch thick. It weighs less than three ounces and runs for several hours on a single AA battery. Instead of a tape or disc mechanism like a conventional portable tape or CD player, the Rio uses Flash RAM memory to store the .MP3 files for playback. The result is that the Rio has no moving parts, so skips are a thing of the past.

Getting the Music

The Rio has an easy-to-install utility that handles the transfer of the MP3 file from a computer to the player. There is an adapter that fits into the parallel (printer) port that allows you to keep your printer hooked-up while also allowing a special 15-pin cable to attach from the parallel port to the Rio.
To put music on the Rio, simply download a legal MP3 off of the Internet, and use the Rio software to transfer it to the player. You can find MP3s at Web sites such as RioPort (www.rioport.com) or MP3.com (www.mp3.com). The whole process is straightforward, and shouldn't scare anyone who can download a file. The Rio can hold 32MB of MP3s, which will provide about 30 minutes of CD-quality audio. Flash memory expansion cards for the Rio ($49.95 for the 16MB, $99.95 for the 32MB upgrade) give the player more storage. Most of the music on the Internet is encoded at the CD-quality 128kbps rate, but some spoken word audio is encoded at lesser data rates. The Rio could hold an hour or more of this kind of audio.

The Sound of the Future

Simply put, the Rio sounds great. An MP3 played on the Rio is nearly indistinguishable from a CD. The player also incorporates some interesting options, such as the A-B feature that allows a listener to loop a segment of a song. This feature would be particularly interesting to musicians who want to learn a segment of a song by listening to the riff repeatedly. There is also an intro feature that will play the first few seconds of each song on the Rio to give the listener an idea of what tracks are on the player.
The Rio also has a simple equalizer with presets for Rock, Jazz and Classical music. A final feature is a hold button, so you can get the Rio playing, engage the hold button and put the player in your pocket, without worrying about accidentally pressing a button.
If there is a downside to the Rio, it is the headphones that come with the player. They sound fine, but they are the small in-the-ear style headphone that many people find uncomfortable. Luckily, the Rio accepts any standard mini plug headphones, so you can easily plug in your own favorite set.
Rio PMP300 Portable Music Player
Diamond Multimedia Systems, Inc.
(800) 4MULTIMEDIA
www.diamondmm.com
$199.95
Minimum System Requirements: Pentium 90, Windows 95/98, Parallel Port