Diamond Rio 500 Portable MP3 Player

The software provided with the Rio 500 is called the Rio Port Audio Manager. It is a combination of four commonly used software tools necessary for managing digital audio content. Specifically speaking the Rio Port Audio Manager software does the following.

• Converts Audio CD files to MP3`s
• Transfer of MP3`s from the PC to the Rio player
• Build and manage your playlist & jukebox
• Internet browser that is configured to search and download digital audio from the web.

The playlist editor is very useful since it allows you to create customized playlists and albums depending on how you want your collection grouped.’ soul’,’rap’,’reggae’ etc or according to artist or what ever way you want it…. So if you are feeling a little down today you can load your Rio500 with a Jennifer lopez, Britney Spears combination playlist and jump right back to life.

The Rio Port Audio Manager let’s you directly convert CD audio files into MP3 format & store them in your PC. This conversion is very fast, and each song took less than two minutes to be converted to the MP3 format.

The web browsing facility that is incorporated in the software allows you to search for your favorite tracks on the web & down load them directly. Nice touch indeed!!

Diamond deserves all the credit for providing a software that is very good all-around and so easy to master.

How good does it sound?

They say that nothings perfect…Well the RIO 500 came very close to proving that wrong. I loaded the 64Megs and was all ready for some good quality music…but man what a disappointment I was into!!!…The Koss headphones are just awful with no quality whatsoever. It lacks any kind of bass response, and the foam covers of the earpiece come off as if they weren’t meant to be there. I lost both covers within the first day of use. It’s such a shame that Diamond included these headphones with the Rio500, cause otherwise we wouldn’t have found anything wrong with this MP3 player. I adjusted the equalizer settings to give maximum bass (10) but the improvement was marginal. The only good I see in these headphones is that they don’t fall of since it loops over each ear.

So I had no choice but to toss the Koss headphones into the trash and use Midlands S4 8200 5.1 Surround Sound Speaker System. Man what a difference! Given the right resources the Rio 500 performs the way it was designed to be. The sound quality is exceptionally good with deep Bass and crisp clean Trebles. Once again I have to say that diamond made a very bad choice with these Koss headphones.

Conclusion

The Rio 500 has been with me for a couple of days now. And I have become the envy of a lot of people. This is DEFINEATLY a very good MP3 player. It’s compact design; durability; ease of use; the great software and the exceptionally good sound quality, makes it a true winner. My advice to anybody looking to buy a portable MP3 player at the moment is; BUY the Rio 500 and ditch those lousy koss headphones for a quality pair. You’ll never regret it.

Pro`s

• Good sound quality
• Very nice hi-tech design
• USB connector for fast transfer
• Expandable memory
• Good software

Con`s

• Very bad selection of headphones.