Introduction
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| RCA Lyra Box Shot |
The MP3 portable player market is rife with devices of all shapes, sizes, prices, features and capabilities. Many of these aspects are related to one another; larger sized players are often the more feature complete, cheaper players are often made of lesser quality materials you get the idea. The RCA Lyra is one of those players with so many features that it is inevitably larger than some of its competition. Although I dont normally like larger gadgets, RCA manages to pack enough features into the Lyra player that I would hesitate to pass it up based on its size factor alone.
Putting things in perspective, I think it important to tell you now that larger sized MP3 portables are still considerably less bulky than a standard portable CD player, so whether the Lyra is actually really large is a matter of looking at it from the MP3 portable market. A good part of the Lyras relatively large size is due to its immaculate 6 line LCD display screen, easily the largest and most impressive screen in MP3 portables. The display has an excellent clarity, is easy to read, and allows for contrast control. It also has a high contrast backlight that allows you to see the screen clearly, even in complete darkness.
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| RCA Lyra & Headphones |
I imagine that the electronics required to drive the Lyra player and its LCD display take up a good amount of space, and I was impressed with many of the features in the player, which is happily one of the most user-friendly portables I have come across. When you first turn the player on, you are greeted with a boot up screen of sorts. But let me tell you why the Lyra needs this boot up time: it works much like a software MP3 player. Files that youve saved to the CompactFlash media are read and displayed in a play list with titles and artist names intact. Thats right, the player actually greets you with a scrollable listing of song titles, 6 at a time on the spacious LCD. There is another pause in the player whenever you start to play songs; a short message asks you to wait while the player loads its software. The wait is not long, though the impatient may find it a small nuisance. Once you are playing a song, the display screen switches to a comprehensive information display with details of the current song. Song title, song artist, song position, bitrate, and track number share the screen with the playmode, volume level, and DSP setting. Normally LCD displays for portable players tend to use low resolution characters and icons, but the LCD that RCA put into the Lyra uses a much finer resolution, which may be a small thing, but impresses me because of the legibility of the song titles and other textual information.
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