If it did not come with a 5 year warranty, I would be worried. I look forward to higher quality units in the future. Quality of music played back is very good, but not as good as a digital MD recording. It is acceptable for me however. The MD format allows me 75 minutes of stereo, or 150 minutes of mono recording at 44.1Khz.
All recording is done in real time.
If I want to go out for a 1 hour run and take some MP3 songs with me that I downloaded earlier in the day, it takes me an hour to record the songs to a blank MD before I can leave. Yes, I can bring multiple MD disks with me, but when I record Realaudio it is generally done unattended, and at night, so I am unable to swap disks during the recording process. It is also a pain for me to swap disks while I am jogging. Recording onto the Rio is a breeze and is one of the huge unsung benefits of the machine. If there is a song I want off of a CD in my library, I rip and encode it using MusicMatch.