SonicBlue Rio Digital Audio Receiver

helloRockview writes: "I've recently purchased a SonicBlue Rio Receiver digital audio receiver, the poor-mans's version of the Turtle Beach Audiotron. It's an interesting piece of hardware and works quite well. I've put together a review of the little silver box and have included some info on its architecture and the communication protocols it uses."

product overview

[Shrubbman]

Well since the review and it's mirror are /.ed a quick google search turned up the company's brief product overview here [riohome.com]

Other reviews

[Nevrar]

I did a bit of a search on google, and came across other reviews.
The cnet review [netscape.com] seems pretty comprehensive...

Re:Mirror - because both sites are /.ed

[mihalis]

Apologies to people who read my previous comments on this topic, but when considering these devices, please also consider the "SliMP3" from Slim Devices [slimdevices.com].

Advantages include :

• open-source cross-platform server (just a perl script).
• high quality vacuum-fluorescent display (it's nice)
• low-noise, low-power, low-heat-output hardware (no fan, no heatsink even!).

Nice review....

[SwedishChef]

but if you want to play your mp3's through a stereo there are cheaper ways to do it... using Linux of course.

Last year, when I wanted to play music in my computer room, I took an old 486/DX120, installed a SoundBlaster 16 card in it, put an old 3com 3c503 NIC into it, found a cheap 20gb HD, scrounged an old 36X CD player, installed SuSE Linux, and sat it in the corner. Then I trotted down to Goodwill and found a nice Kenwood 75 watt-per-channel stereo amplifier for $29.95 and a pair of bookshelf speakers for $7.95. I then drove over to the Radio Shack store and bought an adapter that allows the audio out from the SB16 to go to the L/R inputs of the amp.

So, for about $120 I have a complete Linux system with 20gb of music on it. I run it from an rlogin session running mp3blaster but, because it also runs Apache, I can set it up to broadcast music to every computer in the house. And the price INCLUDES the amplifier and speakers!!!

But wait, it gets better. For that same $120 I can also export an X11 session to listen to internet radio and control it on any X/box. Plus I can set up SMB and NFS shares to allow the machine to be used as a file server AND music server!!!

Want more? Okay... I can also export a Gnutella and/or Napster client and download music from the 'net. Or do it via a news client and the usenet.

As a bonus, I can ssh into my firewall, rlogin to the mp3 box, and wake my kids up in time for school from 1,000 miles away!! (I recommend rap for this.)

The only thing I haven't done yet is make it into a CD burner; I do that on my wife's machine (under, I'm afraid, Windoze). But still, with a little bit of scrounging almost any Linux geek can come up with the same (or better) system for the same (or lower) money.

The best part is that I'm the first guy on my block to have my kids yell at me, "Dad, will you turn that damn music down?"

Re:Hard coded MAC address?

[Breace]

They probably own an IEEE assigned range (which is the proper way to obtain MAC addresses for Ethernet interfaces see this link [ieee.org]) and their software responds based upon that knowledge.

So the software really doesn't send a DHCP respond for only one MAC, but a range.

FYI: Diamond Multimedia owns 00-90-00 (which allows them to have 16,777,216 unique addresses).

Re:A much better alternative

[Pope]

1) Not everyone has digital inputs on their amps

2) It all gets turned into analog between the amp and speaker, so who cares? The "quality" difference is going to negligible, especially since you're already compressing it.