HP Officially Announces 40g MP3 Stereo Component

jspectre writes "HP announced their new de100c "digital entertainment center." Containing a 40g drive and a built in CDRW drive it will store "up to 750 CDs of music" or 9000 tracks. You can make your own playlists and burn them out to CDR/CDRW's. All of this for $999.99. No mention of any digital management controls on the device." I totally need a review model! I saw this thing at the last LinuxWorld and it looked good, but only really playing with it for a few weeks will let me know if it's better then the audiotron that I've been using in my home system.

Comments

When will it be $300 bucks?

[wessto]

If I want it for my home, why would I buy this? can't I get an actual CD Jukebox that stores around 100 CD's for about $300? Yeah Yeah, it's cool and everything, but I won't be rushing out to get one. Mp3's seem cost effective in their portability. At home though, $1000 seems a bit much.

why?

[s20451]

How is this significantly different from getting a kick-ass sound card (for around $200) and a 40g hard drive (for around $150) in my computer (which I already own) and hooking it up to my stereo? I can't think of a good reason to spend $999 for dedicated hardware.

Re:why?

[barole]

Yes, if you have already spent a lot of time and money making that room look the way you want it to look.

Re:why?

[schmaltz]

Because it (guessing) makes less noise than a PC?

You'll find that's not the case. The specs quote THD and dynamic range values (-86dB and 87dB respectively) that are on par with cheap PC soundcards, significantly worse than decent home and prosumer audio gear.

Combine that with artifacts introduced and frequences subtraced by lossy MP3 compression, you've a recipe for poor quality sound (caveat: I've not listened to one yet.)

For a kilobuck, you can have a nice quality CD juke that'll give you much better sound quality.

And, it is a PC. Read the specs. I'd pry one open before buying to see if the audio output section/soundcard is built into the system board. In PCs where that's the case, I've found there to be *loads* of mobo-generated noise.

Hmmm.

[Anonymous Coward]

People are gonna be pissed when copy protection breaks these things.

Storage in the wrong place

[Mwongozi]

Since this thing is supposed to sit in your hi-fi stack, it's not supposed to be portable, yes? And since it plays MP3s, it's assumed that you own a PC, yes?

So why put any storage in it at all? Why not just shove a network socket on the back, or make it 802.11x aware, and play MP3s off a server on your network?

That would be sweet.

Expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

Kind of pricy, considering it doesn't have any speakers with it. For $1000, you could build a computer with much more than 40 GP of space and a nice sound card, and get things like gaming, internet, and office functionality out of it too.

Re:that's strange...

[Distan]

Not strange at all. The merger has barely been announced, while these products must have been in the pipeline for awhile.

Furthermore, even if the companies wanted to not step on each other's toes, the law requires that they continue to behave as competitors until the final merger goes through.

Re:Waste of money

[Anonymous Coward]

> You can build or purchase a pc that has more
> functionality

We might be able to build one, but not everybody can. And not everybody wants a PC in their living room. The price is high, but as we know, it will come down. Hope HP makes it...they've been doing some cool stuff recently.

$999?!?!?

[iceT]

It's that a little high on the price? A Rio Reciever is only $150, and the audiotron is only $300... Hell, a TiVO with a 60GB hard drive is only $400 (list)...

How do they justify a grand?

not completely protection-free

[Acrucis]

I saw this thing at LWCE too, and it looks like it will kick ass. However, talking with the guy I asked if it was a standard IDE HDD that could be upgraded. He said that to keep the RIAA sorts happy all the mp3s were stored encrypted and that it was some sort of proprietary interface to keep people from swapping out HDDs. He said that you could pay for them to put in a bigger HDD, but that they had to have something to keep the lawsuits away, and that they were pleased that this was all it took to get approval from the music industry.

Its all about marketing

[SteveBobson]

They arent trying to sell this system to the average /.er. They are trying to sell this to the millionaire house wife that is tired of sorting through her 250 different Yanni CDs who doesnt know the difference between a sound card and a credit card.

They started the price extremely high for a purpose, the price will come down, but not before a bunch of the technology deficient purchase them.

Re:Waste of money

[biggerboy]

I think we covered this somewhere else -- why would anyone want a honking, fan-blowing PC running while their stereo is going?

It's the usual /. PC-centric rant. The only thing missing is the word Linux.

Uncle Joe might buy one

[ucblockhead]

Because Uncle Joe doesn't know how to build a PC, and hasn't a clue about networking. Uncle Joe knows how to hook up a stereo, though.

"Slashdot posters" aren't a big enough market to pursue. "High-end stereo buyers", on the other hand, are.

Re:Waste of money

[Score Whore]

It's funny how everybody figures that they can slap one of these things together from the spare parts in their junk pile. How much do you want to bet that the analog audio portion of this device is better (ie. better S-to-N ratio, wider dynamic range, etc.) ? How about their software? Sure you may be content with a pound sign and a blinking cursor in an x-term, but some of us would rather have a device that actually acts like what it does, rather than pretends to be what it does. I've been building this kind of box in my spare time and it's not trivial. At a price point of $1,000 I'll probably continue with my project, but if they get down to $500, my homebrew solution is out the door.

What I really want

[Zeinfeld]

The HP gear is close to what I want but almost certain to be compromised with DRM restrictions.

What I really want is something that is a larger equivalent of my Archos device. I want it to appear on the network as a PC with a large shared hard drive.

I would want a minimum of 100Gb of storage.

Alternatively a completely diskless pod with about 16Mb ram, an 802.11b network access point, sound output and some sorta TV interface would serve the same purpose. It could pull the toones off my PC server. With a larger buffer (128Mb or more) it could do video as well.