Rio Central Advanced Digital Audio Center

Rio's Advanced Digital Audio Center lets you instantly store, organize, and access a large personal CD and digital music collection. The unit's powerful 40 GB hard drive stores more than 650 CDs or 6,500 songs and enables you to find specific tracks instantly, create unlimited playlists, write custom CDs, and transfer music to Rio portables or a Rio receiver somewhere else in the home (using its convenient front and back USB ports). It features a large display, intuitive interface, and advanced search features that make it simple to locate any musical selection almost instantly.

Using the Advanced Digital Audio Center is easy: just load a disc and it does the rest. CDs are automatically cataloged as they are recorded, with artist, album, song title, and other relevant information instantly assigned to each file to make later searches easier. The unit encodes at a bit rate of up to 320 kbps MP3 for high-performance digital sound quality, and provides an optional, lower bit rate encoding option for downloading to portables. It also has a built-in 10 mbps home PNA connection for streaming music to one or more Rio receivers, and a built-in 56 kbps modem that can be used to dial out to retrieve information from the Internet. It comes with a full-function remote control, two AA batteries (for the remote), a software CD for PC, phone, USB, stereo RCA, and AC power cables. The unit supports common audio formats, such as MP3 and WMA, and can be upgraded to emerging digital standards.

1 Just Buy A Computer And Save Money
Nice simple device, but $1.5K for this? You can buy two or three nice, small-format computers, *with* the little LCD, that have much more advanced features like a DVD burner, not a CD burner, and gigabit or wireless ethernet, not a 56K modem, USB 2.0, firewire, more format compatibility, more control over output formats, the ability to output to a TV for games, movies, etc., the list goes on.

Rio is lucky I'm feeling generous. The one star is for being able to give it to me in one package. The pricing is atrocious though.

2 What the heck is that?!
That's what everyone says when they see the box with the big blue screen in it. That's my music library I tell them and then I demonstrate by scrolling through the hundreds of albums it ripped the first day I got it. After about this point I'm uncertain as to whether I lose the person to the Oscilloscope visual that dances to the music or the magnitude of potential this device can have in their own home hi-fi.

It has a warehouse-size 40G computer hard-drive that will store right around 6K good quality tunes (160-192khz). You think 6K isn't allot? How many tracks are on the CD you're playing right now? Now do the math. If you still don't think thats allot, there are several documented procedures for upgrading to 120G.

Networking to your home computer is a bit tricky but can be done by anyone with a little know-how. Now you can get all those MP3s off your silly little Altec Lansings and onto your Pioneers for some real listening. If you can't network, the RADAC will take data CD-Rs as well.

The sound quality coming out of this device is better than most audio equipment these days. Which means they had the high-level audio connoisseur (tube amp, electrostatics, belt-drive turntable, etc.) in mind.

Not THAT into music? The convenience factor is super-high with this device. I've put all my CDs into the closet (for safe keeping -- I don't know) and just run the first thing that comes into my head. Graceland by Paul Simon? Sure... and it's playing.
Mixed the perfect driving music by mistake last night? The RADAC can burn you an audio CD for the commute before the coffee pot finishes.
What was that tune the wife was playing the other day? Search by tracks recently played. Forgot you had that album, didn't you?
Parties are a cakewalk. Create a custom play list where you pick all the tracks to be played or select several albums and randomize the tracks or whatever and just let it run. You're out of wine. Never out of music.