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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."
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.
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.
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.
w o r l d w i d e w e b e r
Better would be to get an SBC that supports Linux, 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 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
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
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!)
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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.
I'm sure that they are cheaper elsewhere.
My commute is only 15-20 minutes. It's about being able to have most of your Music with you, not just the subset you happen to have tediously burned to CD.
Remember, those CD's self-destruct at fairly low temperature. My car is black/black.
Besides, the last thing I want in a Z06 Corvette are CD's flying everywhere.
I've been looking at this thing for the past month. I want one and I will probably buy one desipte the product's demise.
Perhaps most important of all is the open source nature of the product. Their software only uses 30% of the CPU capacity. The rest is up for grabs. You can login via the ethernet and get a shell - any shell you want to install and use.
You can expand it with your own hard drives.
They give away a developer's toolkit. The people who made this thing really seemed to have a clue.
I'm investigating using the device to store chassis and engine performance data while I listen to music.. Since I already have ethernet in my garage (doesn't everyone?), plugging the car into the net is no problem.
I considered building my own player using an embedded Linux system. I could have done it, but I'm smarter than that. it would have taken a lot of time and cost nearly as much - if not a lot more once the kinks were ironed out (even assuming my time is 'free' - far from it). And the software and UI just aren't there. Lots of work! In the end, my system would have been grossly inferior.
I use a Palm to control my Phatbox since I don't have a compatible head unit. The whole system works really well. boxster.sixpak.org/mp3/
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)?
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
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....
Paul Gillingwater
MBA, CISSP, CISM