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