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Rio Car (Empeg) Sounds Like History
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."
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)
Need to get away?
Adirondack Vacations
http://geek.empeg.com/developer/
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.
I'm going to post a detailed review later, it'll be up at http://pobox.com/~jaffray/phatnoise.html. 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.
they are laptop hard drives (already built for shock resistence), the drives are shockmounted on a special sled, and the drives are rarely spun up in the first place due to a good caching scheme.
Three levels:
1. 2.5" laptop disks with good shock tolerance
2. The disks are spun down most of the time
3. A custom shock mounted disk tray
These things are used in 4x4's, low riders, and even the occassional Cessna.
Rob
I know! When there's already a bunch of people doing it over at MP3Car, 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.
later,
ajay
My MP3 player, BLAINE, 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.
--
#nohup cat
MP3Public 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 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!
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
- Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero.
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.