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.

Comments

Why the Obsession with Stereo Components?

[dreadpiratemark]

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

Re:HAHAHAHAHHA! 1500 bucks?

[phrenzy]

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

Re:Keep this in mind though.

[phrenzy]

I'm not too sure what point you're making, but the HSX109 has been developed by the same team as the empeg. We even had some of our car player owners help with alpha testing.

Under the hood, the new product looks a lot like the car player as it shares a common codebase. Of course there's a lot of new stuff, but it's still Linux and you can still hack at it if you want. As someone(one of our beta testers I assume) pointed out, you can even get a shell up on the screen. As soon as the unit ships there's certain to be a BBS just like for the car player (empeg.comms.net) and Receiver (rioreceiver.comms.net) where developers and users can get together and work out details for the software updates and so forth.

Rob

High-Quality MP3 is an oxymoron.

[Wakko Warner]

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.