Amazon.com Product Review
Amazon.com Product Description Take your music collection with you anywhere with the RCA Lyra RD2850 hard-drive digital audio player, which can store 5,000 CD-quality songs (MP3 files encoded at 128 kbps) on its 20 GB hard drive. Amazingly slim at just 1 inch thick, it also weighs only 3.4 ounces. It plays both MP3 and WMA formats, as well as Secure WMA files offered by online download services. It also features an FM tuner with the capability of recording programming with the touch of a single button. Recorded audio files are saved and stored in MP3 format for uploading to a PC. It has a large, easily readable 2.1-inch LCD.
The Lyra DJ feature creates an automatic smart playlist that contains related types of music. It uses the PC to analyze your music collection based on mathematical audio analysis and neural network learning to create groups of musically-related playlists that can easily be transferred to the RD2850. With the SmartTrax navigation feature, you can easily browse audio files according to artist, album, genre, year or song title. Songs can be tagged as "dislike" during playback for editing or deleting later. The player has several EQ presets, including bass boost, rock, pop, and jazz, as well as a user-configurable equalizer setting.
The RD2010 is designed to be PlaysForSure-verified out of the box and works seamlessly with Windows Media Player 10, including support for Auto Sync to sync your music, photos and playlists. You can choose from a growing number of PlaysForSure download and subscription stores, such as F.Y.E (For Your Entertainment), MSN Music, Musicmatch, MusicNow, Napster, and Wal-Mart Music Downloads.
What's in the Box RCA Lyra RD2850 player, AC adapter, USB cable, line-out cable, car adapter kit, clip earphones, and CD-ROM with Lyra Jukebox and MusicMatch Jukebox software.
Choose your music. Choose your device. Know it's going to work.
Look for the PlaysForSure logo if you're shopping for a portable music or video device and you want to make sure the digital music and video you purchase will play back on it every time. Match the PlaysForSure logo on a large selection of leading devices and online music stores. If you see the logo, you'll know your digital music will play for sure.
The PlaysForSure logo makes it easy to find digital media stores and devices that work together. Choose from a large number of digital music and video stores, including CinemaNow, MSN Music, MusicMatch, MusicNow, Napster, Wal-Mart Music Downloads, and many more.
Look for the PlaysForSure logo on a wide variety of devices including portable music devices, portable video devices, digital audio receivers, Pocket PC's and Smartphones.
The checkmarks indicate if the device is capable of playing back audio and/or video that's been downloaded from an online store. Additionally some devices will be able to play back media that has been purchase through an online store that offers subscription or rentals. |  |
Customer Reviews
Average Customer Review
(18 customer reviews) 29 of 29 people found the following review helpful
A solid HDD Audio player,
December 1, 2004 J. Coty "book and music enthusiast" (East Lansing, MI USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: RCA RD2850 20GB Lyra Audio HDD Digital Audio Player (Electronics)
Had I not been able to resolve several issues that did come up in using the player initially, I would consider the RD2850 a below average player. As it is, I would consider it a solid audio file player with a few limitations.
As I was searching for a hard disk digital audio player, I noticed the Lyra RD2850 came with everything you need to use it universally: ear clips, rca connector for stereos, car adapter kit, and usb to connect to your computer. This and the size and weight were major motivating factors which resulted in my purchase. Some of the other hard drive MP3 players force you to purchase these items separately, and virtually all of them are larger and heavier than the Lyra.
Unfortunately, upon purchasing my Lyra and loading it with music files, I discovered a few problems.
Problem 1 - many of my WMA files wouldn't play. Apparently, the Lyra is not compatible with WMA files created by Media Player 10, which included those purchased from...Read more
13 of 13 people found the following review helpful
Space, Size, and Solid,
October 4, 2004 Scott F. Smith "madrush" (Charlotte, NC United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: RCA RD2850 20GB Lyra Audio HDD Digital Audio Player (Electronics)
I had spent over 3 months researching players and finally settled on the RCA2850. There isn't much bad to say about this model, although a few things kept it from getting 5 stars. My principle concern was space and having 20Gb makes the difference. I've got over 1200 songs on it already and still have over 14Gb to spare. Keep in mind however, the majority of my music is ripped 128K WMA. I've found MP3 at the same rate to be slightly more expensive spacewise, and I personally haven't noticed a sound quality difference. So obviously higher bitrates will result in more used space.
Physically, the construction is solid. Metal is the primary material (instead of cheaper plastic) and the controls don't feel flimsy. The one minus is that sometimes it takes a few times for the control to register with the player. Don't know if it's a firmware or a hardware issue, but every now and then it can become annoying. The size surprised me. It's much smaller than I would've...Read more
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful
Thomson (RCA) Lyra - Used with Linux,
August 6, 2006 Colin Smith (Glasgow, Scotland) - See all my reviews
This review is from: RCA RD2850 20GB Lyra Audio HDD Digital Audio Player (Electronics)
ok I'm using this thing in an unsupported Linux environment, but basically it works. Plug it in and it appears as a USB drive, drag and drop mp3 files onto the device. They play fine.
The battery life is good, a day's play no problem, the capacity is 20Gb and it can handle any type of file so is useful for data transfers between machines etc. It's capacity actually makes audio books worthwhile though it doesn't play Audible's .aa files.
Audio quality is very good, but the earphones you get with the device are cheap, get a decent set.
The user interface on the player kind of sucks. It profiles the M3s into genre, year, artist, album etc based on the mp3 tags, so make sure they're correct or it's a mess to use. If you use Linux, get hold of easytag and set all the tags correctly or use something like Grip which will fill the tags in from freedb.
The big niggle and why it's only getting 3 stars is that you can't play music *while it's...Read more
