In January 2008, Thomson sold its Consumer Electronics part including the RCA brand and Lyra line to AudioVox.

[3] The Lyra was an early pioneer in digital audio players, although in later years most of its output were OEM products.

[6] The Lyra was developed in partnership between Thomson Multimedia and RealNetworks - it has integration with the RealJukebox Windows software and, alongside encrypted MP3, can also play Real's G2 format audio files.

A supported setup would take a blank CF card, recognize the correct reader attached to the PC, and then while syncing songs to the device, convert them to an encrypted version of RealAudio, MP3, MP3Pro, and later WMA format that is unrecognizable to any other device.

It also drops a folder title 'Pmp' onto the root level of the device, which contains the boot image, a config file, and one or more executable, wma.exe, mp3.exe, or rlm.exe.

Modified versions of the wma.exe program have been made, capable of playing unencrypted WMA files.

[10] This can be used in conjunction with a non-certified CF reader, making the device usable again to anyone who lost theirs and cannot acquire a new one.

At these sizes though, boot time becomes significantly long, as the Lyra scans the entire card before presenting you with any menu.

The RD2204A can also be used with a third party CF reader, provided that the user installs the RCA software on the PC.

[12] It has a newer, faster external CF reader that now uses the USB interface instead of the parallel port.

[19] With a 1 inch hard drive, the Micro Jukebox RD2760/PDP2810 introduced at CES 2003 is a small compact player but with 1.5 GB space.

[23] Introduced at CES 2003, it was also one of the first portable media players capable of playing MPEG-4 encoded videos.

The PDP-2860 was also UMS-capable, meaning that it could act as a portable external harddrive with no additional software or driver installation.

The small, compact RD1080 was released in 2002 and has a blue backlit LCD and built-in FM radio.

The included software, Blaze Media Encoder, can transcode from most popular video and audio formats.

[32] The Lyra X3030 features a 30 GB hard drive with support for many audio and video formats.

The first documentation to be shipped spoke of a system tray resident icon and program to manage the device.

[40] As of August 2004 in the United States market, RCA had a 9% share among both flash and hard disk portable media players, ranking it fourth behind Apple, Rio and iRiver.