RCA H106

For accessing the menus, the player has four buttons and a mechanical wheel on its front. At first I thought I had a defective unit because every time I spun the wheel and clicked what I thought was the appropriate button, I kept launching the same song. RCA includes only a rudimentary Quick Start guide (which lacks interface instructions), and while the company's Web site offers a link to an instruction book, that link didn't work when I tried it. I showed the unit to several other editors, and it wasn't until the fourth person handled it that we realized we were clicking the wrong buttons. Maybe I should blame Apple for training everyone to click the center button on the iPod?

Once I mastered the H106's counterintuitive button setup, I dove into the menus, where I found a mysterious item called Profile. The unit let me select Yes, and then it loaded a profile. But I still don't know what that means. Another extra: The H106 has the annoying default habit of organizing album tracks in alphabetical order instead of the order they appear on the album itself.

Moving tracks onto the unit proved to be the easiest part of the experience. The company includes a disc with Yahoo's usable Music Engine; I transferred files using my existing Rhapsody jukebox. The H106 supports Microsoft's PlaysForSure standard, so it should work with most online music stores (except Apple iTunes, of course). The device supports MP3, WMA, and Audible formats.

However, the H106 performed admirably in our audio quality tests, notching an overall score of 81 for a Very Good rating. In our frequency response and harmonic distortion tests, it earned the highest score of the players tested this month. In my informal tests, however, the maximum volume seemed a bit weak.

RCA includes a too-short, beige-colored USB cable and a pair of decent earbuds. The player has an FM tuner, but you can only save eight station presets, which isn't enough here in the San Francisco Bay Area, where there's a station on just about every channel. The unit received several stations well enough for me to hear the music, but there was always a static hiss in the background.

RCA is clearly targeting the budget-minded set with its H106. But the unit isn't that inexpensive compared to other midcapacity hard-drive players on the market. Unless you've got a thing for annoying interfaces and tiny monochrome screens, skip the H106.

Tom Mainelli