S3/Diamond Rio 600 Review

The Internet brought a worldwide source of information to our fingertips, and 9-56k modems forced this global information network to squeeze through our phone lines. The Internet is designed, though, to be viewed on this bandwidth budget, which is why web pages are full of compressed GIF and JPEG images, and why files to be downloaded are compressed into ZIP or such other formats.

When the MP3 format emerged, the Internet at last had a practical medium with which to transmit audio data. This gave birth to a new age of digital audio, with software such as Napster feeding the public's hunger for on-demand audio. Besides the Internet side of MP3, multiple portable devices have been manufactured. These portable solid-state memory devices hold many advantages over portable CD players or even mini-discs, the main one being the lack of moving parts. This means no jerking or skipping, along with the lower power consumption due to not powering moving parts.

One of the latest portable music devices on the market is the new Rio 600 from Diamond, the same company that kicked off the whole portable MP3 player market with the Rio 300.

This article will be not only be looking at the Rio 600, but at the various audio compression schemes it supports and to determine which one is better. The technology behind MP3 will be discussed, to explain how an entire CD can be fit into 32 MB of memory.