PhilipOHare: Its in no way unique to the Karma. Any product of this nature will experience 'issues'. Go to Google and type in 'Broken iPod' and see how many bad reviews you read.

What's your point? When iPods break down, I'd expect people to complain about them, as I've done here. I don't see how the hard drive failure rates of iPods or Zens or any other players excuse the failure of my Karma; simply writing the issue off as unavoidable is a sycophantic cop-out. Apple's repair/replacement time is reportedly very fast; if there really isn't anything that Rio can do about the Karma drive failures, then shouldn't Rio's/DNNA's response time be just as quick?

PhilipOHare: Of course, you seldom hear of the people who love their products and have no problems, so it will always seem that there are a higher proportion of faulty units that there actually are.

On this board, the praise for the Karma far outweighs the negative remarks. The same is true over at amazon.com (almost entirely five star reviews) and a few other sites I've visited.