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Genica Tavarua MP3/CD Player
By Kelly Lu - January 29, 2001
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Futurists from the early and mid portions of the 20th century have often imagined of a year 2000 where flying cars and holographic displays are common belongings of a household. Well, as we are now in the year 2001, it's safe to say that these fantasies about the year 2000 are quite a ways from coming true. We did, however, witness the rapid acceptance of one of the most influential audio technologies ever: MP3. The year 2000 is the year that we saw the rapid expansion of MP3 technology from the hard drives of personal computers to the storage of portable devices that we now like to refer to as MP3 players.
In case you have been lost in a forest for the past few years, MP3 is an audio compression technology that can take an audio file that would normally take up, let's say, 50MB as a WAV file into a little file no more than 3 or 4MB in size, with almost no audible loss of quality. This allows for two important features that have contributed to the success of the technology itself: ease of transfer and storage. The former enables a full-length song to be transferred through a network such as the Internet in less than 15 mins on a 56kbps connection or can be played almost instantly on a broadband connection such as cable or ADSL. The latter allows the storage of many more songs in the same amount of space than traditional forms, which permits the creation and success of the MP3 players that we're talking about here.
Such MP3 players first came in the form of tiny devices that used memory to store the data. The first-ever MP3 player that just happens to use this technology is the Diamond (now known as S3) Rio 300. The player included 32MB of memory for storing "up to an hour of music," so Diamond had claimed, but realistically, only about half an hour of MP3 files at a bit rate of 128kbps, which brings us to the main disadvantage of using memory for storage. Since memory chips are still quite expensive to manufacturer, makers of such MP3 players are limited to including only small amounts of memory to keep costs down; early MP3 players such as the Rio 300 commonly had 32MB of memory with some makers now including 64MB of built-in memory, which is enough for about an hour of high-quality audio. Seeing this problem, manufacturers have often stuck expandability features into their players, often in the form of Compact Flash slots. Unfortunately, Compact Flash memory cards were not any cheaper, leaving the majority of MP3 player owners stuck with their small 32-64MB of built-in memory.
Fortunately, alternatives were being introduced throughout the year 2000 to combat this limitation. One of these alternatives comes at a time where CD-RW drives are becoming more and more popular and are basically super-charged CD Discmans often called MP3/CD players for, well, their ability to play MP3 files recorded onto CD-R's. The first of these hybrid devices is the device that we're reviewing here, the Genica Tavarua. The advantages and disadvantages of these MP3/CD players are obvious; their storage medium, CD-R discs, allow for a whopping 650MB of music storage (this allows for the user to carry around 150 songs, each about 4-5MB in size compared to the usual hour or so of music that regular audio CD's can hold) but require that the user own or have access to a CD burner. Furthermore, because CD's are greater in physical size than memory chips, these MP3/CD players are often giants when compared to their memory-storage-MP3-player-cousins.
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