I have just noticed that the Rio Receiver has disappeared from the Rio website. So, is there a new version coming or have SB given up on it ?

(there is also a thread about this on the Rio Receiver/Central board)

Giving up on it would be a real dumb decision considering the central has just come out to run a load of recievers

they were liquidating them at 99 dollars at TigerDirect last week.

Looks like it's dead or a new version is dropping that is using a code base that the Empeg fellas did!

The empeg team were the people that designed the Rio Reciever in the first place so their code is already in it

- Trevor

Giving up on it would be a real dumb decision considering the central has just come out to run a load of recievers

I both strongly agree and strongly disagree!

Strongly agree: I had my first contact with a Receiver last night. My friend broke down and bought one from Tiger when he saw the $99 price. To the extent that that we exercised the software, the unit worked well (DHCP, find server, playlists...worky!). For a lot of folks, it'd be great to have 2-5 of these around the house. SB should keep making Receivers.

Strongly disagree: The display is a complete showstopper. The images in adverts don't do justice to how bad it is. Why bother with a remote if you can't read the display from further away than arms length? I can think of only two happy-making installation possibilities: on a nightstand or on a desk in a dimly-lit office. My friend's intent was to hook this to their stereo, but that won't happen. His wife would ensure that he would wind up on a cold slab in the county morgue within a day. Sonicblue will only bring bad karma upon itself if it continues to produce *this* receiver.

Jim

I agree that the unit's display is terrible. But if all you do is put it on shuffle and let it go (like I do) it's not a huge deal.

But if all you do is put it on shuffle and let it go (like I do) it's not a huge deal.

Yup. And that's the way I use my Empeg 80 percent of the time both at home and elsewhere (I love the surprises and juxtapositions of shuffle). No idea what percent of potential users are more oriented to picking specific songs and playlists, but I have to believe it's a significant proportion and for those folks I think the current receiver would be a huge disappointment (and that it's hard to gauge that in advance).

What about the fact that the Receiver can't handle large MP3 collections? Seems to be the stupid considering the point of the product.

I have something like 13,000 tracks on my hard drive, and when I try to access the lists by Artist, Genre, etc. or try to search, the unit reboots itself.

Yeah, that's a bug. It just so happens that I never even try to play that many tracks on the receiver, I always only play smaller playlists. You can also work around the rebooting thing by using Jreceiver as a server instead.

Speaking of which.... I think I'll be getting one of these for fathers day, i've been reading that the software provided is crappy. How hard is jreceiver to set up? Is there a lot of compiling and such? I looked at the website and went through the install documentation but it looked like it was mostly written for linux....

The software isn't crappy, it's just rather minimal and simple compared to what you're used to on the empeg car player. And it has a couple of bugs.

Installing jreciever takes a while, took me an hour to install all the stuff on a win platform and still don't have it working yet.

Sean