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SonicBlue's Digital Audio Center
grecorj writes "This article on the NY Times website (free registration blah blah blah) talks about SONICblue's new Advanced Digital Audio Center ; a digital entertainment hub which can store up to 650 hours of music. For $1500!" Here is a press release
that has a bit more details. It sure does seem overpriced for only a 40G
hard drive.
Good luck.
Evan - needs to hit preview before submitting
What is this recent spat of discussions about stereo component MP3 players? Uh, I ran cables from the back of a standard Creative Live! sound card to my stereo system for a lot less than $1500. Even the more reasonable 'stereo component' systems still cost $250, which strikes me as a lot of money for not much more functionality. My total cost was about $40 (including the $30 for the MusicMatch Jukebox) by the time i got done with cables, etc - with it all running off of an old P200 I had sitting around.
So, what does the extra $1460 get me here? A remote? A LCD screen? A CDRW? And a box that looks about the same size as an XBox that I will have to cram into my stereo cabinet.
If you want a 40 gig MP3 player for your stereo that isn't based off of your PC, buy a Creative Nomad Jukebox retrofitted with a bigger HD from www.nomadjukebox.net for 1/3rd of the price - and you can take it with you when you want to go somewhere! I just don't get this obsession with adding another large box to a stereo setup....
-Mark
Before you all start bitchin' about the non-open side of this, I purchased the "empeg" car player. Yeah it was pricey when I got it, and for another 30 gigs of drive space even more so, (it now has 50Gb on it), but it runs linux on arm architecture and for the 20 hour drive I just did yesterday from Milan to London, it was a damn godsend to listen to music I wanted to listen to. In fact, the only problem I had was that I had 11 days left of toons to listen to when I got back to my house....
Oh, and the customer & techincal support people are the best. Take a look at geek.empeg.com to see what they give to the techies who want to prod under the bonnet of the thing... (and yes I'm too lazy to make it a hyperlink).
Two wrongs may not make a right, but three
"Sadly, it looks like it uses a 56k modem to access CDDB, even though it has a 10mbps connection as well. " You can use the ethernet connection instead.
In Sonicblue's press release
"Built-in 56 kbps modem dials out to receive software and CDDB updates when necessary. Alternatively, you can use your home's broadband connection for even speedier downloads."
If you have one, it uses your broadband connection (HPNA or Ethernet via a USB->Ethernet adapter) to pick up tags and software updates.
The modem is for people without a net connection of their own.
In any case 450,000 CD's are on a local CDDB database so it doesn't have to go out to the net too often.
Rob
-- Freddie Starr ate my empeg
No, the software was developed in-house by the team-formerly-known-as-empeg.
Rob
-- Freddie Starr ate my empeg
If you're coming from san jose, drive north on 101 until you get past the san thomas expressway, start looking to the right. You'll see exodus, network associates, and then SonicBlue all in the same area.
:P
If you're coming south from San Fransicso on 101, drive past the great america parkway exit and look left. It's right there. can't miss em.
Big buildings.
Anyhow, enough trolling for me
Actually, this can't be targeted at real audiophiles for one simple reason. Real audiophiles don't use onboard DACs. Instead they use seperate DACs produced by real DAC experts instead of using onboard ones. Additionaly, seperate preprocessing circuity is used to reclock the signal to exactly match the expected clock. I don't own a seperate DAC at this point, but I can hear the difference on other people's system. The people who build these DACs know far more about building them then any transport manufacture.
-- Any statement of the form "X is the one, true Y" is FALSE.
sonicblue did NOT invent the empeg.... they bought it.
And when they bought it, it was already a complete product, in production, running linux, and it was designed by the designers to be uber-hackable. To change all that, revoke all the cool info on the website, etc, would be to toally screw over all the marketing already done for the product.
For some reason everyone seems to be adding up the cost of the hardware (and getting it very wrong - there's rather more than just a hard disk in there) and overlooking the software development.
With a quick mental calculation, I believe there's around 10,000 man hours of work in the software of this product - not counting the hardware design and the ID, and not counting the significant code re-use from our common codebase. I guess some of you here will have a basic concept of the hourly rate of a good programmer..
It's necessary to make back that investment, along with the many hundreds of thousands of dollars invested in design, tooling, marketing and so forth.
..and is our software worth all that effort? I think so. Perhaps some of you will have the good grace to reserve judgement until you've actually used it.
Rob
-- Freddie Starr ate my empeg
Or read the NYT article without registration by going to:/ www.nytimes.com/reuters/technology/tech-tech-sonic blue.html w ww.nytimes.com/reuters/technology/tech-tech-sonicb lue.html
http://archives.nytimes.com/auth/login?URI=http:/
OR
http://college.nytimes.com/auth/login?URI=http://
The editors should be changing the links, in my opinion, to bypass that reg. screen.
With regard the ripping, you don't have to set any options to get a high quality rip. The ripping code was one of the big tasks in developing this product - it's all custom, designed by a ripping nutter (well his surname is Ripley so what do you expect), and it does an incredible job. It will rip stuff that causes CD Paranoia to quietly retire to the bathroom.
Rob
-- Freddie Starr ate my empeg
They could have the best, cleanest digital signal processors in the world in that box. Would it matter if the average moron encodes their MP3s at 128 or 160K? You're not gonna gain much from superior electronics if your source material is crap.
SHN all the way for me...
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"