Slashdot Mirror
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."
For the average user the $999 price tag is a little steep whe you compare it to an $300 AIWA mp3 cd player.
Warning! Keep Out of Eyes! Wash Out with Water! Don't Drink Soap! Dilute! Dilute!
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
"Useless organic meatbag" -HK-47
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
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..
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
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?
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.
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 (-;
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
$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.
One actually did try to get to that site but it was /.'ed for one pretty quickly. One instead went to the product homepage 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.
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?
http://geek.empeg.com/developer/
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.
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...
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.
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
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!
Mine does >:)
OK, that's enough shameless plugs for me.
--
#nohup cat
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.
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.
"Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality." -Jules de Gautier
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.
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 (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.
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.
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 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.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
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
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 :)
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
You really have no clue, do you?
Until you've heard one, used one, experienced one, the price might seem high. Afterwards, it seems reasonable.
-- toolie
The encoder you use matters more than you might think. In short, using anything other than LAME is not a fair test to determine your bitrate needs. Try LAME at 160k VBR, and compare to your 320k encoded with anything else.
And if you're using Xing, then nothing can help you, it'll sound like total crap at any combination of settings.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
I'm using my hearing and my backside to tell you MP3s at less than 320k do not have the same sonic quality as an original CD.
First off: I had at one point in time a very expensive stereo system in my car. I have a nice system now, but no quad subwoofer anymore :). Kinda hurts accelleration..
Anyhow, what you are hearing isn't the difference in "sonic quality" from the mp3. It's more likely the deck you're using. Most decks have much more time devoted to the circuitry and preamps on the CD than the auxillary in, or even the internal mp3. Most aux in jacks will hurt quality because they assume you've already done all the processing.
How to test this theory? Take a CD. Rip a song (you still can do that, I think.. but hurry) and encode it at 192 or 128. 128 for the sake of arguement. Play it. It'll sound different, because the circuitry needs to be retuned. Then take that mp3, decode it, and burn it again. You'll notice all that "lost" quality reappeared, because it really didn't go anywhere.
Unless your ears are trained, you'll never hear a difference. At least I don't. If you think mp3s suck that bad.. have fun with the mountain o cds (or limited selection).
..don't panic