When my old NJB3 died, I realized just what a gap I had in my life without one of these little gizmos. If you’ve read anything on this site, you know what a geek I am for music. I ran a record store for several years, and I’ve been in and around the industry for about 15 years. I’ve been exposed to so much over that time, that I’ve got the Alexandrian Library of Pop music in my head, and almost as much in my closet.
When I was a kid, the Walkman was the greatest invention since movable type. The idea of being able to carry around music and shut out the outside world for it was something immensely gratifying and liberating. There’s been much said lately about the “iPod effect,” but really, it’s just a successor to a mentality fostered by the old handheld tape deck. It’s nice that the iPod’s popularity makes me look like a little less of a dork walking down the street with a pair of headphones over my ears, but hey, I’ve been doing that for years.
For me, the NJB3 was satori. I no longer had to cart around a stack of tapes (or later, MiniDiscs). It was all in one place at my fingertips, and it sounded great. I had some gripes about it, but at the end of the day, it was the best-sounding portable device of its time.
When it died on me, I realized how dependent I had become on it. I did alot of research before setting on a replacement, and it came down to two choices: the iRiver ihp-120 or the Rio Karma. I turned at first to the iRiver because it supported optical recording, but as it turns out, the iRiver isn’t suited (or even meant, as it would seem) for anything above the level of voice-dictation, which pretty much negates that as a selling point. The other plus was generic USB Mass-Storage support (“MSC”), but the price for that appears to be reliance on the FAT32 filesystem, and all the defects and troubles that entails. The iRiver’s got heaps of promise, but it all just fell flat in the long run, so I returned it and turned to the dark-horse contender, the Karma.
The Karma aims to be an mp3 (and ogg, and flac) player, and nothing more. That said, it’s an exceptional player that just seems to get everything right. It doesn’t record (but none of the ones that do get it right), it doesn’t have an FM tuner (which I never used, anyway), and it doesn’t have a remote. What it does boast is possibly one of the best overall interfaces I’ve ever seen in a portable player from every standpoint.
You can find pictures of the Karma pretty much anywhere on the web, so I’ll spare the bandwidth and provide exactly one. As you can tell, this thing is small. That’s a Sharp MiniDisc recorder on the right, which is pretty small itself.
The ergonomics may look strange, but I was amazed how comfortably this thing fit in my hand. The rubberized panel on the right (where your fingers wrap around) is a good touch. Volume is controlled by two buttons on the left, and navigation and playback are controlled jointly by the joystick and a velocity-sensitive scrollwheel on the upper right. The Karma’s a bit chubbier than most, but it feels more rounded as a result. Although it’s made entirely of plastic (unlike the iRiver’s solid aluminum heft), build quality feels solid, and in over a month, I’ve had no problems.
Tomorrow: Connection and Sound Quality