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.

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.

$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.

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.

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.