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Next Generation of Portable Music Players
RCA Lyra Personal Digital Player, Sharp MD-MT15 Internet Bundle, Sony VAIO Music Clip
Good news: There are more ways than ever to take Internet audio with you, and more are coming. I tested three of the newest sound machines: RCA's $200 Lyra, Sharp's $250 MD-MT15 Internet Bundle, and Sony's $299 VAIO Music Clip.
Music With a Pop
The RCA Lyra boasts great sound, the lowest price, and the best tone-control features of this bunch. Besides presets for various music styles (which all three provide), an equalizer mode lets you tweak bass and treble. Its LCD, unlike most others', can display up to six songs. But the larger screen pushes the 3.3-ounce Lyra into the portly camp, at least for MP3 players.
Also, loading music onto the product is a bit of a pain. Your tunes live on a removable 32MB flash memory card (a 64MB Lyra is $250). To transfer songs, use the bundled RealNetworks RealJukebox software. But first, you must remove the card and plug it into the included CompactFlash Reader/Writer, which attaches to your PC's parallel and keyboard ports. RCA plans to ship a $129 USB adapter by the time you read this--it's long overdue.
The Lyra's support for the MP3, RealSystem G2 and Windows Media audio formats is a mixed blessing. When it switches between formats, the Lyra produces a loud pop that can be painful if you're wearing headphones. RCA says it will fix this flaw in future Lyra models.
Sharp, Kind Of
Sharp's MD-MT15 Internet Bundle offers greater flexibility than the others here and is ultimately easier on the pocketbook. It uses MiniDiscs, which hold 74 minutes of audio and cost just a few dollars--a far cry from the $90-plus cost of 32MB flash memory cards. The 6.4-ounce unit is bigger than any MP3 player but small enough to carry.
Voquette's bundled NetLink hardware connects the Sharp to your PC's speaker jack (there's a second jack for your speakers). This lets the Sharp record any PC audio--from MP3s to "you've got mail" notices.
However, to record MP3 files, you must play them in real time--you can't just download them. And because audio comes from the computer's speaker jack, it undergoes further processing that lowers quality.
Another bundled utility, also from Voquette, lets you schedule recording sessions as you would with a VCR. It's a bit rough, but works. The utility also has text-to-speech features so you can record e-mail or Word documents, for example.
Sony's Hip Clip
About the size of a penlight, Sony's VAIO Music Clip weighs just 1.6 ounces. But in there it packs 64MB of flash memory that can hold MP3 and WAV, as well as ATRAC3 audio, a Sony-developed compression scheme. The memory isn't removable, limiting your on-the-go music choices, but what's there sounds good.
The Music Clip's downside is its OpenMG Jukebox software, whose copy-protection schemes are only slightly less inconvenient than a surveillance bracelet. For example, you can't use MP3 files without first converting them into Sony's protected format, which took about 2 minutes per song on my Pentium II-400. And transfers to the player are slowed because the software encrypts each song for your specific player first. A 7MB file transfer took 32 seconds--just as long as with RCA's Lyra, despite the Sony's fast USB connection.
Pick Your Player
The RCA Lyra is relatively inexpensive, but its current memory writer complicates tune transfers. Players from Rio and Creative Labs offer comparable features and USB for just $50 more.
If you want to record any noise your PC can make, check Sharp's player. As for Sony's Music Clip--the onerous conversion process will keep most MP3 users away. But its hardware design is terrific; consider it if you're willing to work mostly with ATRAC3 files.
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