The Rio was the first MP3 player on the market and in terms of styling shows its age. But in terms of features the Rio hasn't dated at all. There are four equalisation modes that beef up the sound - normal, classic, jazz and rock - although usually it's a matter of cycling through them to find which sounds best. There's also an intro play button, and an A-B function which repeats an excerpt of music. There are also random play and track repeat buttons.

Noticeably missing is a track name listing on the LCD panel. However, you do get a minute and second count and an indication of the remaining battery power.

The in-ear headphones proved both clear and punchy in our tests, avoiding the overly wet bass response of most personal stereo headphones. We'd argue they were possibly the best on test here although, as always, sound quality is subjective.

Inside the Rio is 32MB of memory and this can be expanded by a flash card slot on the underside of the machine. The card can be locked in place, and a separate control also allows you to lock the controls to avoid accidentally pressing them.

Power is from a single AA battery and connection to the PC is by the parallel port. The Rio Manager software looks fantastic and also lets you play music CDs, but perhaps isn't the easiest to use. We had to experiment a little to find out how to download songs into the player. With an ECP parallel port, songs took around 10 seconds to transfer, which we felt was plenty fast enough. Also supplied is Music Match Jukebox which lets you 'rip' songs from CD.