This is the second-generation Hi-MD playback unit. Notice the similarities to last year's MZ-E630 MDLP player. This unit has the HD amp as well as a connexion for an external battery pack. The internal battery is still the old NiMH one they've been using for the last few generations, but I'm not complaining as it's interchangeable with all the old ones I have floating around.

As you can see, it's only slightly larger than the discs themselves, but it's still a bit thicker than the EH1.

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A bit back I posted that Rio had gone belly-up. All assets had been sold to Sigmatel, and hope for anything developed by their team looked lost.

Looks like I jumped the gun.

Turns out, Sigmatel has kept Rio's development team, along with everything they'd been working on when Rio closed up shop. According to a thread on Riovolution, the whole STMP3600 reference design that was planned for the Chroma is still alive and well, and will likely be used as the foundation for other players soon. That includes the best features of the Karma (gapless …

Sony is finally phasing out the DAT medium (Babelfish translation and community reaction). To be honest, I thought this happened years ago. There are no plans to cease production on the blank tapes themselves, but recording/playback equipment will no longer be made.

Why is this important? Well, it goes a long way towards showing that "obsolete" formats still have some life left as long as a) there's a dedicated user-base, and b) blank media are still available. Take Minidisc, for example: the format was written off as a failure outside of Japan back around 1998, …

I've talked about my experiences with the ihp-120 previously. It's a great piece of hardware, but iRiver really fumbled the software, and though they promised updates to rectify some of the more glaring omissions, nothing was ever released, and the product line has since been eclipsed by newer models. This left many users (myself included) feeling burned.

I ended up returning mine for a Rio Karma, which is a wonderful player, but Rio's closed up shop, and their promised next-generation players have gone from vaporware to ghostware.

A few months ago, a friend of mine decided to ditch …

I absolutely love my Rio Karma. It's the best portable audio unit I've ever owned. Rio chose to make a pure audio (as opposed to a half-baked PDA or video player or personal storage or whatever…) player and to do it right. I have music pretty much everywhere I go, and the Karma's pretty much the perfect gadget for me.

About a year back, Rio announced that they were doing R&D on the Karma's successor, tenatively called the Chroma. Details were sketchy, but the few things that had been left out of the Karma, like Audible …

Here's the 2005 flagship playback unit. The NH1 is the recorder, and the NH3D (which is very rare) is the downloader. Still waiting for word on the next-gen units, which should have full mp3 compatibility as well as uploading capacity.

The new Hi-MD units do support uncompressed PCM, as well as the new 256 and 352kb/s bitrates. The Hi-MD amp sounds clean and clear, though I can't distinguish any difference between the Class D amps they were using in the last series.

With Sony's newer EX90 headphones. These are getting warmer as …

iRiver has posted a schedule that promises several overdue upgrades to the ihp-series players. Users should see gapless playback, on-the-fly playlisting, true shuffle mode, and onboard file deletion implemented between May and June. Perhaps this will address the hard-drive performance issues as well.

Rio has posted a new firmware for the Karma. Mostly bugfixes, but you can check out the details here.

Talked to one of the Rio engineers and got a few corrections and additions to the technical data.

- The CPU is the 5003, not the 5002. The 5003 has a better cache architecture and some other improvements (and an ethernet MAC onboard).

- USB onboard the 5003 is not used, as this is USB1, 12MBit. There's a Cypress controller doing the USB2 480Mbit.

- The RAM usage is actually more buffer than workspace/code/fonts/etc. We don't use the Hitachi's APM features, we just turn it off – the APM stuff isn't low power enough. I'm not aware of any HDD jukebox which relies

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Rio hasn't published any detailed specs for the Karma beyond the usual product-sheet stuff, so I've gathered what backend information I could find about its inner workings. A big thanks to Dave Marsh and everyone over at Riovolution for digging this stuff up.

The CPU is from a company called PortalPlayer. It's a neat jack-of-all trades chip specifically designed for portable media devices, series PP5002. It's got two 90Mhz ARM7 RISC processors running symmetrically in 32-bit. One controls the decoding and signal output, while the other handles the interface (buttons, LCD) and hard-drive. It …

As far as navigation, this thing is in a class of its own. All files transferred to the Karma need to have tidy ID3 tags, because that's how everything's organized. The onboard database allows for browsing and selection by Artist, Genre, Year, and Album, and there's a neat feature called 'Rio DJ', which allows the user to specify certain paramaters, such as most-frequently played tracks or oldest tracks, then creates a dynamic playlist from them. Playlists can be created and edited on the fly, and files can be deleted directly from the player. It's a credit to the efficiency of …

The menu and database systems are excellent, and as I'd later learn, they're a product of engineers who really seem to be proud of their work. It shows. Unlike the iRiver, the Karma doesn't show up as an MSC device. It has to be accessed through an intermediary software layer, much like Creative players. I used to deplore this approach, but after seeing the alternative, I've got to say that this is better. However, where Creative drops the ball with horrendous (read: MusicMatch) software, and Windows-only compatibility, the folks at Rio have thought this one through a little better.

The Karma …