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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."
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
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.
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 (-;
$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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)?