TechoLiO
A plethora of all things technical.

Audio

First of all, let me say that RCA was pretty smart to put a few samples of audio, pics and video on there, but pretty dumb to not put the best on them! If you just play the sample songs, you'll be disappointed in hearing some poorly encoded 128kbit mp3, swishy highs and all.

But once I put a few samples of my own on there, ahhh, much better. The audio seemed OK, but the big problem here is that there is no equalizer yet! This control just says "flat" and you get that old "future update" message. That is very annoying.

Again, since the software is missing so much, it's really hard to critique it for anything beyond how it sounds. You can't bring up playlists, or anything like that yet, or much else. About all I could do was play all songs in a folder. The skipping function advances the time, but it just starts the song over (with erroneous time!!)

Navigation once you get a bunch of songs there is very slow since you have to scroll through all artists, songs or whatever. It also takes a while to stop play and return to menu as well as back up a level (1-2 seconds).

I put the line output into my yamaha amp, which also has an audiotron unit hooked up digitally. The audiotron is a device that can play back my mp3's from my pc via the network. In comparing the sound of the identical song file (one on my pc, one in the lyra), it was pretty close, and not unexpected for digital vs. analog, so I'd say the RCA is doing a good job here. It is a shame there is no digital out!!! However I didn't play quiet passages....

Not acceptable yet

Later when I listened to quiet passages on the earbuds, I found some distortion and odd noises! It really was quite noticable, and not apparent on my other players, so it wasn't the encoding. I use the old -r2mix vbr encoding via lame.

For this reason, the mp3 playback isn't acceptable for me, I returned the unit myself. I am not sure how it's decoded and if firmware would remedy this. I don't have "golden ears" so noticing this easily says a lot. Since lots of other features are missing or aren't perfected, this is my motivation for a return. I really need that mp3 playback to be good.

I tested it in my car and that also exposed that odd distortion at lower levels, and I really noticed it lacked the punch of my CD play with the same song. This was a good comparison because the CD was created from the same mp3. Just not cutting it for me in the audio department!

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