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Linux Business

Rio Car (Empeg) Sounds Like History 276

Posted by timothy from the didn't-play-oggs dept.
An Anonymous Coward writes: "An unoffical announcement on the empeg BBS (home of their finatical user base) is that SONICblue's current aftermarket car linux product, the Rio Car (formerly the empeg Car Player) has been EOL'd. While it remains the most advanced car player available, there was not enough demand to keep that group profitable. It will continue to be sold through their e-stores (Non-USA and USA) until inventory is exhausted. This was/is the ultimate in car stereo for MP3 playback. Disappointing."
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Rio Car (Empeg) Sounds Like History More

Rio Car (Empeg) Sounds Like History

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  • Price... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by dane23 ( 135106 ) on Monday September 24, 2001 @06:28PM (#2343911) Homepage
    For the average user the $999 [sonicblue.com] price tag is a little steep whe you compare it to an $300 AIWA [aiwa.com] mp3 cd player.
    • A budget car stereo that plays MP3 CDs is no comparison to an empeg that stores up to 2500 CDs inside the dash, instantly available and thorughly cataloged. No waiting for the head unit to read the directory listing on the CD
      • Apparently no comparison at all. The aiwa is a much better deal, at least thats what consumers say.

      • Re:Price... (Score:2, Funny)

        by IronClad ( 114176 )
        No waiting for the head unit to read the director listing on the CD

        Sheesh, $1000 / 3 seconds delay when you change a disk. Even my billing rate isn't that high. :)

    • I looked at these, and ended up with a Nomad with 6GB, a stereo with auxilary input, 20 cds(all indies thank-you), and $400 left over. I really think I got the better deal, it is really easy to yank the Nomad inside and USB it to the PC for a new music change. Granted it is not as COOL as the Empeg, but as an added BONUS, my palm omni-remote will drive my NOMAD, sort of :)

  • How did this happen? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by DragonPup ( 302885 ) on Monday September 24, 2001 @06:29PM (#2343927)
    For a mere cost of $1000-1900, why weren't people buying these in droves? Seriously, while cool, I'd just buy a car stereo that plays mp3 cds and burn some CDs. It's a cool idea what they did, it's just way overpriced.

    -Henry
    • You'd be surprised how difficult it is to deliver a product to market at a reasonable price. Consumer electronic distribution channels (which Rio was trying to use) pocket about 33% of the $1000 price tag. Additionally, Rio has to make some money off this. Then it comes down to components, and things like LCDs, hard drives, processors add up quick. Rio was probably making an OK margin on these, but it's not like they were making bank at all. The reason they were the only company with a car jukebox is because most companies have noted that it's not economically feasable yet.
      • My MP3 player, BLAINE [suicideisfun.com], cost me under $250 to build, and has 40GB of space. Right now, it's at around 78% capacity, and has 3983 songs by 387 artists on 302 albumbs!

        Of course, it required that I wrote my own software and built my own hardware; but it's worth it to be driving around with 40 GB of throbbing MP3 goodness.

    • Re:How did this happen? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by FFFish ( 7567 )
      No shit.

      MP3-CD car deck: $500ish. Top-end Plextor CDRW: $200ish. Spindle of CDs: $30ish.

      Total cost: $750ish.

      With the $250 to $1150 left over, I can buy me a shipload of good music.

      And it's a helluva lot easier to burn me a CD than to dink around hauling the player carcass from the car to the cradle, connecting up the cradle, flashing the MP3 drive, deconnecting the bloody cradle, and then lugging the carcass back out to the car. Oi!

      Good idea, real innovative the month it was introduced, obsoleted PDQ. (Now, make one of 'em with a Bluetooth/802.11/whatever wireless interface, so I can update the drive without even being near the car, and my interest might be piqued!)
      • The Mark II empeg features Serial, USB and Ethernet interfaces.

        Many users have connected the ethernet interface to a wireless bridge so that they can upload songs whenever their car is in range of the house without having to remove the unit.

        In practise, because of the capacity of the empeg, i find i only take it inside once every six months or so to put new tunes on it.

        And personally, i find it much easier to drag and drop songs onto my empeg than to burn MP3 CDs.
    • Or just do what the rest of the world did, buy a $120-$160 decent CD player and just burn normal CDs/CDRWs.

      I'm rarely in my car for > 30mins at a time, and with CDs being like $0.30 and drive speeds burning at 16x-24x (i.e. a few minutes), I'd just make a playlist, burn it while getting ready, and grab it 5 minutes later on the way out. I've got about 15 of these that have all of the music that I commonly listen to, and I rarely need to change CDs while driving.
    • I've wanted something like an Empeg, a system which uses a hard drive to play music. Many people have told me to just get a MP3 CD player which is a lot cheaper; but it's just not the same: I want a system so that I don't have to carry around cds anymore. The Empeg provides that.

      Furthermore, the sytem isn't exactly overpriced. I've seen build-your-own systems and in order to get it as compact and as nice-looking as the Empeg, it costs over $1000. The problem for the Empeg is that it's too expensive for how much most people would use it: Most people don't drive around all day, and they're only in their cars for a very limited time. Spending $1000 on just a receiver (especially one that isn't a chick magnet like an in-dash DVD player) doesn't exactly fall into the budget of most people.

      If I had $1000 to burn, I would definitely have bought one; it's exactly what I want. However, if I had a $1000 to burn, I'd also spend it on something else first...
  • These players ROCK. I have a 60GB model and I better go get another one before they are all out. I can't believe that they EOL'd it. Don't have time to post a witty comment here,.. I gotta go buy another one for my other car.

    --Aaron
    • ...what's the appeal? It costs $1K (without tuner) versus $200 for an in-dash CD-RW player (with tuner). Using a CD is actually a little more convenient, since you don't have to pull out the whole thing just to download your music files.

      BTW, is it easy to pull out? I'd hate to have a $1K device in my car that's easy to steal.

      Oh yeah, the hard disk can hold as much music as 100 CDs. So you can only fit 10 hours of listening onto a single CD. I guess with 60 gigs you can drive around for about a month without going home to change your, uh, music files. But would you really want to?

      • Well, the reason I wanted one is becuase CDs even CD's packed full of MP3's are completely unsuited for the environment I wanted to run one of these things.

        I do a lot of off-roading in my truck in very sandy and dusty areas - this is murder on CD's and pretty much anything mechanical that isn't completely sealed.

        I wish I had the money to get an EMPEG but instead I've been working on piecing together my own system since I can't drop $1,000 all at once like that.

        My biggest problem has been finding an affordable HD that can take enough abuse to live in the environment I want to run it. I'm leaning towards just using CF cards but then I'm back at the price problems again.

        • I think you're the guy that ran over my pet coyote. Oh well, never mind.

          So you're looking at hard disks just because they're sealed? Yet you're having trouble finding an affordable drive that can stand the shock. I would think it would be easier to find a CD drive for rough conditions than a hard drive. True, CD drives aren't sealed, but you can put them in a dustproof enclosure. Get something with fat buffers so skipping won't be a big issue. That just leaves you with the problem of finding a device sturdy enough, but you've got that anyway.

          But it sounds to me like you need a system that doesn't have anymoving parts. This MMC-based system [crutchfield.com] (or your home-hacked alternative) would seem to fit the bill. Yeah, MMC cards are horrendously expensive compared to hard disks. But if you're budgeting, say, $200 for your storage medium, you can afford 256MB of storage. Puny by today's standards, but still enough to hold several hours of music.

  • Cost (Score:1, Redundant)

    by ichimunki ( 194887 )
    Considering it cost $1000 for the cheapest one, why wouldn't I just buy a laptop with a decent sound card? Hell, my car isn't even worth $1000. I'd use an old P/133 in the trunk before I spent this much on a Rio Car Player. I mean it's a car. The sound in a car is bound to pretty much suck since you're out there driving anyway. How is any car audio worth this much unless you are a truck driver and spend more time in the cab than anywhere else in the world?
    • The rio car player was designed to fit nicely in your dash; it has the same form factor as a normal car stereo. That's the major advantage, otherwise, yes, you might as well put a computer in your trunk [sourceforge.net].

  • Totally Portable is better than In-Car (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I had wanted an in-car mp3 player for the longest time, but once they started making totally-portable playes with 4+gigs of space on them, I prefer them much better. Right now I have an archos jukebox and plug it into my car stereo which has a aux-in plug in the deck. (and yes, I bought a new deck unit just so that I could have an aux-in to plug my mp3 player into). The unit is totally portable, so I can plug it into my stereo at home, in my car, or at a party at my friends place. I feel this is is a more convenient (and cheaper) solution than the in-car units.
  • This doesn't surprise me in the least. I had planned to buy a nice high-end portable mp3 player for my car, back when Napster was Napster. Now I have serious questions about the validity of the whole mp3 format. The RIAA has said time and again it wont use them, it wants a more "secure" form of digital music. Without confidence in the viability of mp3's, the players will not do well.
  • Do any of these things play oggs?
    Not wanting to risk patent infringement suits causing me problems, I removed all of my mp3s and re-ripped everything as ogg vorbis files. Does anything out there play them? I'd love to have an ogg player that can replace my measly 10-disc changer.
    • exactly. i'm waiting for ogg to become finalized before purchasing these units. i'd like something like this on long road trips, so that i won't be stuck listening to country music (not that there's anything wrong with country music)
      not too many stations playing the oldies like dead kennedys and X.

    • Mine does [suicideisfun.com] >:)

      OK, that's enough shameless plugs for me.

  • grrrrrr (Score:2, Funny)

    by victwenty ( 451152 )
    this really sucks, i've got a 40gig empeg MKII and love it. i've been wondering how long it will last before i start having problems with the hard drives but it's been rock solid over the last year. still, i've wondered when the day will come that i'll have to replace it or just want to upgrade.. i certaintly hope that if any company picks up the flames they will keep it open (and linux based). i'm not familiar if all the empeg source was under the gpl or just kernel mods, but it would be nice if any remaining closed code was opened..
    • Support hasn't been discontinued, but even so the hard disks are regular 2.5" laptop drives. All the software you need to initialise a new one can be downloaded from empeg.com.

      The code isn't being opened because, as the announcement at the empeg BBS stated, SONICblue are moving to an OEM model with major manufacturers (instead of attempting to build their own automotive brand). The source is also common to a number of other current and forthcoming Rio products.

      Rob
  • http://www.ssiamerica.com/products/cj510/ [ssiamerica.com]

    Looks pretty freaking rad, but is it coming out? the website says "Summer 2001"...looks like it needs to be updated one way or another.

    Anyone have any insight on this company?
    • At the MP3 summit SSI mentioned to me that this model had been shelved due to the current climate for MP3 hardware.

      The new SONICblue automotive sales model - working with major auto manufacturers and OEM's - would seem to be the best bet now. Of course, average car owners don't want cool geek toys with Ethernet and all the other fun things we threw into the empeg with little regard for cost reduction :-(

      Rob

  • Not enough demand?? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by SCHecklerX ( 229973 ) <greg@gksnetworks.com> on Monday September 24, 2001 @06:39PM (#2344020) Homepage
    I remember signing up to be notified when my name hit the top of the list to be able to purchase one of these.

    I never heard anything.
    • I remember signing up to be notified when my name hit the top of the list to be able to purchase one of these.

      So did I.

      I never heard anything.

      I heard back from them. I got an email stating that my number (1620-something, IIRC), had come up and that I was welcome to place an order.

      The only problem was that was fourteen (14) months after I had registered with them for a spot in line. By that time, I had already spent the money I was saving for it, and the new headunit I'd also need, on something else.

  • MP3 Businesses (Score:2, Interesting)

    by worldwideweber ( 116531 )
    It seems to me like the people driving the MP3 craze are actually people who can't afford to buy CDs, especially when 9 out of 12 tracks suck (people like me). It also seems to me that people dealing in MP3s are technically adept... adept enough not to buy a specific, specialty product when a general product like a laptop will suffice. It also seems that most people who buy cars are also old enough to not know how to operate most MP3 players. In any case, it seems like the margins for this product are infinitely small. So how does this company expect MP3 users to afford or actually choose to purchase this product? I wonder who does the market research for this kind of thing.
    • Boy, ain't that the truth.

      Car stereos are expensive enough as it is. A head unit is only part of the cost if you want decent sound; you also have to look into new speakers, plus installation cost (or a weekend if you do it yourself).

      I worked for a telecom company that had the same problem; they spared no expense ensuring they had the finest possible product. The problem was that they then had to push that cost onto customers and finance building the product. They just had their second round of layoffs, and are down to a third of the size they were at a year ago.

      I don't see why this is bad news. Of course, you should expect it to be a great product for $1k, but for most users, why spend $1k when you can get a $200 MP3 CD unit? Heck, you can get a portable MP3 CD player and a cassette-deck adapter for less than $100. MP3 sound quality isn't anything to shout about, so why not?

      I don't think your comments about folks who buy cars is really relevant, though. I'm old enough to buy a car and I sure as heck know how to do the MP3 thing. Even guys in Marketing here at work listen to their huge libraries of encoded MP3's while they type up reports.

      But the real issue is, as you say, that you don't really get $800 worth of extra value out of the $800 extra you spend on one of these. You can do the same thing with a handful of MP3 CD's, which are more convenient to handle and cheap as dirt.
  • Are we really wondering why the market barfed at this?

    I thought long and hard before I coughed up the mere $300 for the AIWA MP3 player. Sure, it only holds one ISO9660 disk at a time, but that's 15-18 albums, better than most changers. And I keep a stash of ISO disks under my visor, making for more than 10 GB. And it plays VBR encoded tracks at my preferred higher bitrates.

    Scrolling to find a track on a HD with 4,000 tracks would a pain on the freeway too.

    Downside is that the AIWA is the *ugliest* thing around; It fits in with my old pickup though.

  • Now what would be COOL would be a car player that played more than just mp3's...like one that would play .ogg and .wma files, too.

    Wouldn't that be spiffy [iobjects.com]?

    • From geek.empeg.com [empeg.com] - "A key design feature is that the car player uses software CODEC's and as such is not tied in to any particular format. Version 1.1 of the player includes both Microsoft WMA and raw WAV support. We also have the option to introduce AAC if the demand arises. The car player, even the Mk.1 version, is not a product that is expected to become obsolete any time soon!"

      Hmm, maybe one should think first, and speak later..
      • One actually did try to get to that site but it was /.'ed for one pretty quickly. One instead went to the product homepage [riohome.com] and found nothing other than it played mp3 files.

        One would think that if the manufacturer was going to add features that they would put it on the product page in case one wanted to actually consider buying the product.

        • Yeah, right. It isn't and wasn't /.ed at all.
          • I tried to go to the announcement instead of the empeg home page, it appears. Nevertheless, not updating the product home page to show such expanded functionality was either a dumb move or signs of impending death.

            • I know it's an unusual idea not to announce new features before they reach a consumer release, but that's the wierd kind of ethics we chose.

              WMA and WAV are currently present only in test versions of the product. They will be available to the wider userbase in about a week.

              We can support other formats if the demand arises (oh, nobody here bothered to mention the part of the announcement which said "software development will continue, with a major new release due shortly").

              We've looked at Ogg, but we need to see an optimal integer implementation for our StrongARM platform before we can seriously consider it. I understand that some effort is going into this.

              Rob
  • dont forget it looked awful ,looking like someone made it out of radioshack parts and a home electronics kit, gimme a tft screen with extra funky goodies and i might of bought it

    asthestics people asthetics!

  • High cost, no PCMCIA (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Wee ( 17189 ) on Monday September 24, 2001 @06:45PM (#2344080)
    If it had a PCMCIA slot, I would have paid the $1000 for it. But without it, no way. I'm not spending a grand to have to lug a unit into some cradle to transfer files.

    Better would be to get an SBC that supports Linux [linuxdevices.com], throw on a microdrive, add an 802.11b card, and then write a set of scripts that rsync to your home MP3 DB when you get in range of the access point (and after you exchange some cryptographic keys, of course). You can then use the apmd stuff to sleep your machine after the transfer.

    I planned on using an old Palm IIIx and a serial cable for the GUI. PalmAMP [sbg.ac.at] works really well (for my purposes, anyway). Of course, it doesn't beat the Empeg's really fancy display. It's very nice. But worth an extra $500? Probably not.

    Bad to see them go. Hopefully, they'll keep their software on the Net so others can play with it still.

    -B

  • sonic blue take over (Score:3, Insightful)

    by johnjones ( 14274 ) on Monday September 24, 2001 @06:46PM (#2344088) Homepage Journal
    hmm suspect that they just didnt want the expense of makeing the units

    lets face it as soon as they where taken over they had lots of money and no motivation to keep selling the product

    they did the development on the homePNA systems so got alot of revenue through development work

    but what really killed them was that ARM went out and did them an core that they could use to do MP3 and WMA decode in the RIO 800 so its mostly hardware now compared to a mostly software solution

    like other things the funtionality it got moved into hardware

    regards

    john jones

    p.s. check out the photo of taco on the BBS
    p.p.s. ed I am writeing a compiler for Xscale (-;

    • Re:sonic blue take over (Score:3, Interesting)

      by altman ( 2944 )
      Nah, we made money on all of them; the real money is in licencing through existing manufacturers though.

      ARM doing a core that did MP3/WMA? No, this isn't true; the ARM7TDMI core was there all along - and the solution is 100% software in the rio 600/800 and nike players (plus the rio volt, intel concert, etc etc).

      In fact, the Rio Receiver we also did at empeg uses the same CPU as the rio 600/800, but with a DRAM interface.

      The same software decoder core is used in the empeg and the rio. We never wrote any mp3 decoders, we just did the surrounding stuff - which is a lot more complex than an mp3 decoder!

      Anyway, you'll see what the empeg team has been up to all this time in a few weeks :)

      Hugo
      empeg
  • Any audiophile who is willing to spend $2000 on a car stereo will NOT go the mp3 route, because they sound like CRAP. Yea, they sound fine coming out of your $10 headphones, but amplify that signal by 800watts/channel, and pump that through some JL or Infinity speakers, and it doesn't sound nearly as good as a cd would.

    It doesn't surprise me that they are EOL'ing it, because it tried to serve a niche market in a niche market (rich tech-savvy people with no ear)
    • Encoded at reasonable bit rates from a reasonable source MP3 can sound fine. I'm running a digital feed out of a Turtle Beach Santa Cruz and into a Cambridge Audio DACMagic II, amped by a Marantz PM66SE KI, with Mordaunt-Short MS25i floorstanders. Not a super high-end setup, but fairly solid mid-range equipment.

      No, MP3s fed from the PC don't sound as good as the source CD. But they are close. Certainly close enough that if I'm sat at my PC doing work and just playing some music, the quality is more than adequate. It's even adequate for just sitting around listening to music.

      The notion (posted somewhere in this sub-thread) that cars are soundproofed to a degree where road, engine and wind noise aren't significant noise factors (whilst moving, obviously) is bullshit. Plus car stereos even at the high end are compromised by their environment. You have a setup where space is at a premium, you don't have luxury of completely defining the acoustic enclosure (why don't all hi-fi speakers look like car doors?) or of seating those listening in an optimal position. Yes, you can design with this in mind. But you will always be behind equally-priced systems that don't suffer the same basic constraints.

      So essentially, I think you're talking out of your arse about quality being the issue. The difference between MP3 and CD quality is minor compared to other factors.
    • Most car stereos have Auxiliary jacks on them, so you can plug in other sound sources. Sometimes they're installed properly; sometimes the jack isn't reachable but it's still back there if you want to look for it. Portable MP3 players range from $100 El Cheapo sets to $260 Archos [mp3car.com] jukeboxes with 6GB laptop drives in them. Plug in , Turn on, Rock out. Depending on the voltage your MP3 player uses, you might want to get a cigarette-lighter adapter to power it, or hotwire from the back of the lighter, or especially for one of the lower-capacity units, just use rechargeable batteries (or builtins, if they have them.)
    • If your definition of good quality sound is 800 watts pumping through JL or Infinity speakers you've got more important things to worry about than the distortion the MP3's introduce. Bletch.
      • What exactly is "good quality sound"? I've always wondered about that.

        I seriously have no clue what brands are known as "good quality sound".

        My friend insists that Bose speakers are the best speakers ever made (not the crappy little Bose WaveRadio, but their real (big) 15-year old speakers w/ whatever reciever system he's using)...

        I don't have anything to compare it to except my dad's Acoustic Research (I think that's what they're called) & his NAD amp... which sound pretty damn good. :)

        What are good speaker and stereo component brands (real stuff, not the integrated-system crap that you could get at Best Buy)?
        • Bose speakers do sound like crap. Overpriced crap at that. The only thing Bose speakers have working for them is that they're nearly indistructable.

          Your dad's setup is probably a pretty good one, with the hardware you mentioned. :)

          You won't find anything that truely sounds good at Best Buy. Their more expensive stuff is ok, but it's WAY overpriced.

          Find yourself a good home theatre store. Bring a few CD's for you, tell the sales guy what you're looking for (2 speakers, under say $700) and he'll pop your cd(s) in and switch between various speakers/hardware to give you an idea what they sound like.

          The "budget" end of good speakers will be somewhere around $500. For $500 you'll get something that sounds 100x better than anything you can find in best buy. You won't get a huge pair of speakers, but size isn't everything in audio quality. B&W makes probably the best budget speakers in the business. Just about anything you find in the home theatre store will be good stuff; use the sales guy -- the places I usually go to don't have commissioned sales people; but they really laid back, know their stuff, and give you a good idea what you can get in your price range.

  • hmm (Score:1)

    by mlong ( 160620 )
    I guess people aren't into spending $1000 for a radio

  • You Must be Joking (Score:4, Flamebait)

    by malus ( 6786 ) on Monday September 24, 2001 @06:52PM (#2344129) Journal
    $999? Kiss my ASS.

    I just bought Aiwa's $349 mp3 cd player (with AM/FM and Auxiliary input)

    Reads cdr's, cdrw's, this thing , Rio player looks like a fsking Joke to me.

    a built in HD? give me a break, kiddies.

    I can stash 2-300 songs (at 128k and higher br) per cd which take me 5 minutes to burn.

    Hell, when a friend likes one of the songs, I GIVE THEM THE CD.

    Rio, go screw. Your product blows. Most 'advanced' mp3 player? Please. Not even an AM radio built in.
    • Not even an AM radio built in.

      Open your PC's case, put an AM radio inside and turn it on, and close the case back up. See what sort of signal you get.

      Speak not from whence you know not.
  • "Finatical" ? ... my current theory is that it's a cross between "fanatical" and "financial"... so, perhaps a valid description of rabid MBA candidates...
  • Yeah, I wouldnt buy it because I cant fit my car in the house to sync the music.

    Seriously though, they should have realized that a CD-MP3 player would have blown them out of the water. Even a little further down the road (pardon the pun), cars will probably have some kind of wireless thingy to listen to streams.
    Just my $.02.

  • ...in a few weeks. Here [dashpc.com] is a link with pictures. It features in dash 6.4" LCD touchscreen, DVD, GPS (via VMware), MP3s, 5" LCD's in the headrests, integrated PSOne, etc... It currently runs Gnome. See the pictures on the page. It's a homebrew project costing much less than emPeg.

    • It's already been slashdotted out of existence.
      The question I have is: how quickly does it boot?
      I've seen projects that use a 1U box with a pentium chip and a 20GB harddrive before, but since they're all just regular PCs, they probably take the same two minutes to boot that my home PC does. I don't want to wait for the music...
      And just imagine when it exceeds the maximal mount count... Yuck!
  • The phat box by phatnoise [phatnoise.com] is still listed. So maybe theirs will release.

    I didn't see anything about price just now, but I believe I saw it at well under $1000, the last time I was there.

    But it doesn't list ogg vorbis as a supported format. X-(
  • I think their biggest problem is that the kind of consumer that would want mp3s in their car, aka Slashdot users, are often willing to build their own, for a lower price.

    • Re:Build your own (Score:2, Informative)

      by ajayrockrock ( 110281 )
      I know! When there's already a bunch of people doing it over at MP3Car [mp3car.com], why would you drop $1000+ on a MP3-only system?

      When I first got interested in MP3 car players, CD-R models were still new (ie. sucked), and Empeg was the only cool model out. I signed up but by the time they allowed me to buy one, I realized that building one would be cheaper (and way more fun). If you're thinking about building a mp3car, then make sure you check out MP3car's Bulletin Board [mp3car.com].

      later,
      ajay
    • Originally I read this as "are often willing to build their own car". And written that way, I was looking for the +1, Funny, because that kind of post is great satire on the typical slashdot user:

      "oh sure, we're going to (embark on lengthy silly task) because that way it will be Free!! It will r0x0r!!"

      "Well, how far have you gotten?"

      "We have a sourceforge site and some PHP and somebody did a killer Flash intro..."

      Easy to talk big on slashdot....

  • Why do people think it is overpriced? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It has laptop hard drives, completely custom electronics, real audiophile-quality sound circuitry, it's built like a tank and the software is amazing and a lesson in good interface design.

    It has a *parametric* equaliser which is worth a couple of hundred dollars alone and it even has ethernet. You can even hook up a base station and make it wireless.

    It costs a fortune to build and the support is top notch - they've been invaluable in helping me with a custom install, why beyond what they would be expected to do.

    Why is it that when a company makes a unique, well designed and built product, at a realistic price, that people put it down?

    Remember - the component cost alone is very high, and no, it isn't justa hundred dollars worth of parts. Remember that these were built in small quantities and the parts people overlook are the most expensive - the metal case, plastic front panel, the packaging.

    The empeg guys never intended for it to be mass-market and appeal to 18 year olds. They built a box that lets you store your entire music collection and carry it around. This isn't competing with portable players and people using laptops.

    Look beyond what *you* can afford and what *you* want. It does what it set out to do perfectly. Just because it isn't the product you'd have designed doesn't mean it isn't a good product.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • PhatNoise - review of an alternative system (Score:5, Informative)

    by jaffray ( 6665 ) on Monday September 24, 2001 @07:28PM (#2344315)
    I considered getting the Empeg, but decided to go with PhatNoise instead. It's also a hard-drive-based car MP3 player, but it emulates a CD changer and works with a standard head unit, and it's considerably cheaper and (for me) more convenient than Empeg. The company is at www.phatnoise.com [phatnoise.com] - they seem to be pretty cool, and have both business and technical clue. The player doesn't support Ogg yet, but given that their desktop software lets you encode to Ogg, I'd expect that capability in a future firmware update.

    I'm going to post a detailed review later, it'll be up at http://pobox.com/~jaffray/phatnoise.html [pobox.com]. In the meantime, I posted this short review to rec.audio.car, and it would seem appropriate here as well:

    I've had my PhatNoise system for about a month. The physical design is very slick, and so is the software. It installed with no difficulty, just like a normal CD changer. The sound quality seems excellent to me. I'll admit that I'm not a golden ear, and my car system, while decent, isn't audiophile quality; but in general listening, and in a few short non-blind A/B tests, I can't distinguish quality of playback of my MP3s (encoded at 192kbps) from the PhatNoise from playback of CDs in the head unit.

    In usage, it behaves exactly like a really big CD changer, up to 99 discs. In a way, that's good - your head unit controls are nicely refined to work with such a changer. On the other hand, if you're trying to find a specific album and song, you really want to have a tree-structured storage, with folders containing subfolders of songs. On the third hand, it could be argued that such an interface would be unsafe to use while driving, between the cognitive load and the need to look at the LCD between button presses.

    Some aspects are still a bit beta-ish. I had problems with occasional skips; very infrequent, very minimal compared to CD skips, but still, MP3s shouldn't do that. They went away when I upgraded to the most recent firmware release a week ago. The PhatMan client software isn't fast enough when handling huge collections (100GB+), even after speed improvements in recent versions, and I've made it crash a few times. The firmware update process isn't as smooth as it should be.

    The system is very hackable. I swapped out the PhatCart's 6GB hard drive for a 12GB drive I had lying around, which was easy, and I expect a larger drive would be just as simple. (20GB 2.5" drives are $110 these days.) The PhatBox itself is an ARM Linux system, the system files on the PhatCart are unencrypted and in fairly obvious formats, and the PhatDock is just a standard IDE-USB bridge. I've already written a simple client which uploads albums to the PhatCart from Linux, so I don't need to use PhatMan in Windows. Overall, the combination of excellent production values and relatively open internals is refreshing. Hopefully they can be persuaded to open the source to the PhatBox's main player daemon as well...

    Compared to the competition: The Rio Car (AKA empeg) is way cooler, without a doubt, since it has its own display and controls and can use them more flexibly. Unfortunately it's much more expensive, and it must be installed in-dash and does not have a detachable face. For me, carrying around a DIN-sized unit and inserting/removing it for every car trip is unacceptable. On the other end of the price range, SSI makes a unit (the Neo 35) that's somewhat cheaper, but they seem to be cutting corners (like using 3.5" drives which are not intended for mobile use), the system doesn't seem nearly as polished in general, and there are some reports from unhappy customers out there.

    Probably the most significant competition is from the various CDR-based MP3 head units. Carrying around a handful of CDRs, each containing a dozen albums, is a reasonable and cheaper alternative to hard-drive units for many users. highwaymp3.com reviews such units, which have gotten a lot better recently. Do your research carefully before buying one, though. They generally don't have upgradeable firmware, meaning that any bugs or missing capabilities will never be fixed. They also won't change in response to emerging standards, so the useful lifetime may be short. For example, imagine if you'd bought a MP3 player several years ago that didn't support VBR, or that glitched when playing back tracks with id3v2 tags. You'd probably want to replace it by now.

    On the whole, I'm very glad I bought the PhatNoise. It's cool, it's useful, I've really enjoyed having it in my car, and for $600 (plus another $100 or $200 to bump up the capacity to 20-30GB), it's not all that expensive for what it offers. I never have to change discs or plug in or unplug anything, I just have hundreds of hours of music available to me, all the time. I'd definitely recommend it to gadget fiends in its current state, and when they ship the final release with up-to-date firmware and options for more capacity, I'd have no reservations about recommending it even to non-techies who just happen to want hundreds of hours of music on tap in their car.

  • Another bad idea dies (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It was never a good idea. Why?

    Price: Two billion bucks for a car radio is just stupid. A few nerds will buy em but then the average consumer says "wha?!?" when they see the price. It was just too expensive. Even for car audio nuts.

    Ease of use: Very silly. You had to get it out if the car to put tracks in it? Hello. Stupid and clunky way of getting the thing to work. An MP3 cd player in your car does a better job. Blank cd's are about 0.30 cents. A much better option with a very cheap media.

    Why are people shocked when a bad idea dies?

    The best ideas always win because people vote with money, not the OS it's based on.

    Jebus

  • Yet another open-source player... (Score:3, Informative)

    by strags ( 209606 ) on Monday September 24, 2001 @07:35PM (#2344354)
    MP3Public [sourceforge.net] is a PIC-microcontroller based MP3 player, using a MAS3507D DSP chip for decoding. It supports both CD-ROM and HD's. The HD uses a custom filesystem, with tracks/albums being downloaded through the parallel port. I built the original a few years ago (actually, I think it was one of the first working HD-based players), and others [mp3ar.com] have contributed significantly to the code/design.

    Firmware/schematics/PC-side source code are all open-sourced. There's a fairly clean C++ library for talking to the player and downloading tracks. I'm really hoping some kind soul will use this to write a nice GUI download application for Linux and Windows. (The current software is Windows only, and crashes fairly regularly).

    Needless to say, this is a fairly complex project - don't try building one unless you've got a fair deal of soldering experience!

  • eConomics of the thing (Score:3, Informative)

    by byrd77 ( 171150 ) on Monday September 24, 2001 @07:55PM (#2344453) Homepage
    Little econ review - demand is a function, it's a relationship between price and quantity. It is typically inverse, thus the higher the price the lower the _quantity demanded_. There is plenty of demand out there, I'd love to have an empeg for my car. Problem is at the price they're charging, I'm not willing to buy one. If they want to make money off the thing, they need to reduce their costs to a sufficient level they can sell the device for a price that a sufficient number of people are willing to pay. Then, maybe they can cover their expenses and turn a tidy profit - not by banking on rich audiophiles and techno-geeks burning their money irrationally. If any group of consumers behaves rationally, it ought to be the educated ones...

    my $0.02

  • I've noticed people posting the current pricing as being overpriced. They cut them back a couple hundred aswell. The starting price for the base model was $1200, not $999. Perhaps when they start getting desperate and they come down in price, I'll consider picking one up.
  • Electronic consumer goods are typically expensive here in Australia, but for AU$239 ( less than US$110 and dropping like a stone) you can get a portable CD player that plays mp3s. It's hard to justify close to an order of magnitude in expense for something that is mounted in the dashboard instead of plugged into the 12V cigarette lighter output and the cassette deck.

    I'm sure that they are cheaper elsewhere.

  • A cool atlernative is the Neo Player.
    http://www.ssiamerica.com/products/neo35/
    I bought it over a year ago for my '97 Chevy Silverado. It put a 13GB hard drive in it.
    The only other upgrade I'd like to see on it is
    wireless ethernet so I can park my truck by the
    house and upload new tunes. Ahh for now I just
    brink it in the House, plug it into my home chassis w/USB, fire up Linux and dump the songs
    to disk.

    What the heck. I paid $189.00 at computer geeks
    for it. Direct from the manufacturer it's more.
    It's still much less than $999.00, you don't have
    a cool flourescent display, but you have a decent
    black on green LCD display.

  • Comments on the complaints here (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Drakino ( 10965 ) on Monday September 24, 2001 @09:26PM (#2344855) Journal
    Well, since slashdot took away my empeg BBS reading ability, I'll post here for a bit. Lets see, the complaints that I have seen so far are:

    1. The cost. $1000 is too much.
    Ok, you probably don't realise what that $1000 gets you. It allows you to listen to your entire music collection whenever you want with a few button presses. (The interface is very slick and easy to use. No need for "next next next x130 times" to get to a song). It also gets you a very hackable in dash Linux computer. Someone already has basic navigation software working on it, and others have added web servers and streaming support when it's on an ethernet connection. Oh, that last point is a good one. I can use the unit in my house, or at work as well. Thats saved me money compaired to getting a portable HDD player, or a home MP3 player. You also get awesome support. You botched a software experiment on the player, doing things way beyond playing MP3s? Well odds are, you would post to the BBS, and have the creators of the product replying to help out. And one last point, you don't have to own a CD burner and a constant source of media to get songs you like. Also, the software is upgradable. The empeg has the power to decode Mpeg4 video, so it's going to be a while before it can't decode an audio format. (Mpeg4 video is decoded decently on an iPaq, and that uses a slightly slower StrongARM)

    2. It has no radio.
    Check again... The Mark 1 had an integrated FM tuner, and the Mark 2 has an optional AM/FM tuner, on an interface that could be used down the road for additional formats. (XM, etc...) It's doubtful that will happen now, but only time will tell.

    3. I could build it for less.
    Sure, if you don't count the time needed to build a player that is useable in the house as well. Also the time needed to develop advanced software that dosen't require your complete attention.

    4. No CD support.
    For the rare need of a CD in the car, I just hook a portable player into the Aux in. If you want the niceness of the empeg, with a CD player, then you are going to probably pay $2000 or more, once Pioneer gets their unit out. Plus that will be locked into the dash.

    5. It could get stolen easially.
    Well, yes, slightly easier then most assuming your stupid enough to leave it in the car all the time. Removable face plates are no security feature. The empeg offers the best security, since you know it won't be stolen from your side.

    6. It's a hassle to hook up to add music.
    Not really. You connect it in house to an ethernet cable, or USB and can sync. Just a slight bit more hassle then portable players, since you also have to have power. But what portable player allows you to stream your music via ethernet? Besides, to me it's much easier then burning a ton of cds to try and match my mood.

    7. It has no built in amp.
    This is a legitimate complaint to some extent. But the market empeg was aiming at, most people would have their own amps anyhow.

    8. It looks like crap.
    Not really. The empeg actually looks like it belongs in my dash, compaired to the cheap plastic look of most car stereos. Plus, it dosen't have 15 billion tiny buttons all over the place. And when it powers up, the screen is awesome with it's size.

    I have enjoyed my empeg (both Mark 1 and 2) quite a bit. It was well worth the money, and I look forward to the rest of the market catching up many years down the road. It was a geeky product, but it did everything I wanted and more.
  • As one of the early adopters (Serial #235) I am happy to report my Empeg is in daily use. I bring it to the office in the handy carry bag, and have music all day, then again during the commute.

    The industrial design of this unit is simply excellent. I wish the developers the best of luck in the OEM market, and believe there's still a place for this in high-end car audio. Sure, the price is a little higher -- but in my opinion fully justified. It would probably even keep working in the dash of a Humvee heading through the Khyber Pass....

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