Diamond Rio 500 for $110 after coupon and rebate at Buy.com

[letian]

buy.com has it for 189.99
there is a $50 rebate from diamond and use $30 new customer(CC) coupon

 

[VinY]

I bought one of these players last December through Value America, and it took them 2 months to get it here. I was quite impressed with its size, yet the only downside is the amount of memory in MP3 players these days. Swapping music is fast, but for long term, it's better off going with a nice Sony MiniDisc player, combined with a good sound card (i.e. Sblive! Platinum 5.1), for recording MP3's to it.

 

[jhassi]

i have the 300, got it for $50 with rebates summer 99, and i don't use it anymore, it's basically worthless. It's only 32megs and uses the parallel port (pass thru doesn't that well), transfers at 100kbyte/second

I bought a Philips/Magnavox 45 second ESP cd player that reads CD-RW for $40 with car kit (Wal-mart closeout). I only have a 4x CD-RW drive, and with Nero I can drag and drop mp3s and have it automatically convert them to wave so it takes me <20 minutes to make a 74 minutes worth of music. If I had one of those Plextors I really really want I'd be done in half that.

To transfer 74 minutes worth of mp3s (74 megs) would take me 740 seconds, or about 12+ minutes.

true, with a Rio I could instantly delete a song and add a different one, but I can only carry 64 minutes with me, I burn another cd-rw and i have another 74 minutes of portable music for less than a buck.

Plus, with the CD player no matter what the bitrate of the song is it's always 74 minutes of music, if I put a couple 192kbps mp3s on a Rio that'll cut the play time down to 40 something minutes.

So:

Rio
pluses:
-instantly delete/add mp3s
-don't need to record a new cd just to remove a single mp3
-very small, very light (the AA battery it runs on weighs more than the device!)
-shows the battery capacity
-NEVER SKIPS (no seriously, it doesn't skip, ever)

cons:
-slow EPP transfer rate (100kbyte/sec)
-if songs are more than 128kbps it'll cut down on play time
-storage very expensive


plus everyone is making portable CD players that play MP3 cds now days (philips has one), by this time next year the market will be flooded with portable mp3 players all under $100, all with a minute or more of anti-skip

oh, what about skipping? I run with this thing for about 30 minutes (3+ miles) and it never skips. Yes if I shake it violently for 45 seconds it will finally skip, but even running isn't enough to do that.

if you have a CD-RW drive right now I'd go with one of the Philips/Magnavox cd players, it says on the box if it'll read CD-RW cds or not so it's not a guessing game.

forget the minidisc players, those will disappear like 8 track with the cheap prices of CD players and CD-RW drives why get a minidisc?

 

[bigbigsavings]

Letian,

VERY nice find, thank you!

Alex