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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.
As long as SonicBlue can play the legal game just well enough to keep selling their boxes, the legal battles are free publicity for them. They get to ride the RIAA/MPAA-is-evil-let's-stick-it-to-the-man bandwagon all the way to the bank. If the opposition manages to actually prevent sales with an injunction of some kind, then they're in trouble.
2.4.13 and you can get a shell on it too ;)
High-end audio components, such as a 24-bit, 96kHz Burr Brown DAC, deliver unprecedented audio quality from a compressed home audio player. 115dB channel separation 101.5dB S/N ratio 0.002% THD+N +0, -0.227dB frequency response (20Hz-20kHz)
:)
...which will do more for sound than your usual Soundblaster. Hook up your PC to your stereo. Play a CD on your PC. Now play a CD on your regular CD player. Notice the difference?
HTH, HAND.
/*drunk.. fix later*/
> It sure does seem overpriced for only a 40G hard drive.
I dunno, if the audio out is as high quality as they claim in the press release, 1500 seems about par for the course for good home stereo equipment. Especially for stuff in the "early adopter" category, it's always marked up a large percentage over what the price would be in a year or two.
I mean if someone can shell out 500 bucks for some floor standing speakers and another grand on an amp/cd/radio reciever(s), that much cash for something state of the art shouldn't be too much of a shock.
At least, it wouldn't be in that fantasy land I heard about once where worthless websites got sold for millions of dollars, so who knows how it'll pan out these days.
And I thought the iPod was overpriced. At least that has firewire. This thing... Convergence where none is needed. Or, likely, where convergence won't work.
It stores and serves up songs to multiple devices. Big deal. Several devices can do this for much less money. With more hard drive space.
So I can copy CD's? I'd like to see the interface. For that kind of money, it better be easier to use than Nero. A lot better. A whole hell of a lot better. As in it should read my mind, figure out what tracks I want on what CD, and burn it by itself.
Did anyone at this company not notice the dot-bomb fallout? Average slobs don't want this. This product appeals to those out-of-work dot-commers. And they're too busy trying to keep their Porsche out of the hands of the repo man.
Will someone please go to their offices with a big freakin' clue-stick, and administer the beatings to those people who so richly deserve them.
(BTW, how long until CT posts a glowing review of his donated 'review model'? Or, maybe he's already been denied one, hence the disparaging 'a bit pricey' comment? I don't know. But he sure has a lot of toys. And yes, I am jealous.)
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Why don't any of these things come with TV out standard? I'm building my own now for this reason. Sure, a big LCD screen is nice, and you don't have to worry about switching off the Packer game ;), but a TV screen would allow a very nice interface for a large collection. Maybe if this thing had TV out, the price wouldn't seem so outrageous.
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. --Winston Churchill
Wait, let me get this straight: $1499 for (1) a 40 gig hard drive and (2) a sleek looking case that fits into my home stereo system?
What are these guys smoking?
Two weeks agao, they come out with the obscenely priced PVR.
Last week, they sue Tivo.
This week, they have an obscenely priced hard drive/case that doesn't even play DVDs! Heck, even the ZapStation -- lame as it is -- has DVD capabilities.
I realize this stuff comes down in price once it establishes its niche in the market place. And I realize -- to some extent, at least -- you gotta give SonicBlue credit for some forward-thinking in a pretty stagnant consumer-digital-recorder marketplace.
But this price -- $1499 -- for a hard drive in a pretty case is beyond outrageous. It's beyond even "obscene." I mean, they're testing the waters here, I realize -- but come on!
Now, if they'd *combine* their new DVR with this digital audio receiver -- and then drop the price to around 699 -- they *might* have an interesting product -- a Tivo, in other words, that can record sound and video onto a CDR or DVD-R (or whatever the format is). Sorta like a DVD version of the Terrapin video recorder that can not only record in every known format -- CDR, VCD, SVCD, DVD -- but can also output digitally (optical or coax) and also send video out across a home LAN --this might be interesting -- especially if the hard drive is upgradable.
40 gigs is nothing these days. Yeah, it holds a lot of music -- 650 hours or whatever -- but what these people oftentimes don't realize is that once you have your 40 gigger filled, you don't stop. I mean, you keep getting *more* music. So 40 gig might be your "basic" music collection, but without any way to expand the 40 to over a 100 or so gigs -- or a way to swap out the filled hard drive for an empty one -- it doesn't make much sense.
Even for those folks who have hundreds of CDs -- and who eschew the MP3 scene -- 40 gigs won't even hold a good amount of CDs. It'll hold a lot, sure, but then what are you supposed to use to digitize the rest of your collection? Spend another $1499 for another measly 40 gigs?
LOL. How about just go into Best Buy, snag the latest and greatest Maxtor/Seagate hard drive for $129 and slap it into your computer.
Assuming $129 is the current price of, say, a 40 gigger -- $1499 ought to buy, well, close to 12 40 gig drives. Which gives a total -- right? -- of around 480 gigs. Now, this is approaching a size that most folks would feel pretty comfortable with -- 480 gigs is a good sized chunk of storage.
And -- finally -- why the hell doesn't some guy start making cool looking PC cases that fit in with stereo racks? I know there's the BookPC cases, but I gotta admit: the SonicBlue case looks pretty cool. I'd easily pay $199 or even $399 for a really, really cool looking case that I could line up with all of my other components -- my amp, DVD, CD, DirecTivo -- that looked like it was actually a component instead of a crappy looking PC case masquerading as a poor-man's SonicBlue digital audio receiver.
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Siggy, siggy, siggy, can't you see? Sometimes your puns just irritate me.
I love when companies say stuff like, "There is no way that our equipment can be used in other way than what we made it for." :)
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Oh bother.
Would a true audiophile use a compressed digital format though? At this price range, this device is targeting two groups.
1. Gadget geeks with loads of cash.
2. Audiophiles who demand the best.
These are smaller markets. It's hard to imagine a true audiophile who listens to most of his/her music in MP3 format. These are the people who complain that CD's are still missing something. They may be fine for most people, but if we are talking abut "most" people, then "most" people don't spend "$1500" on a piece of stereo equipment.
InstantCool
Fight back against what? Free registration?
FYI: Yahoo gets paid for ads served when you look at the story on their site, too, just like the good old NYT.
If they think they can have 650 hours in high quality music.
If they're going to include 100mbps ethernet, why bother putting a HD on the unit in the first place? Why not stream the data over the e-net, from the larger, cheaper, more upgradeable HD in your PC? And if you're doing that, and seeing as to how most people would prefer the audio be input directly into their pre-amp via glass or RCA unconverted, what exactly are you paying for? The remote?
Synergy is your friend
I didn't see anything about mirrored hard drives. What happens when the hard drive goes "clunk-clunk"? For $1500.00 you'd think they'd give you redundant hard drives.
For $1500.00 you can build a nice PC with an IDE raid card and two much bigger hard drives and still have enough money left over for a turtle beach audiotron.
-ted
I mean, I could buy the ingredients for a steak dinner for much, much less than it would cost to eat that dinner at a fine restaurant, but those ingredients don't magically drive themselves home from the grocery store, combine themselves and jump in the oven, then levitate over to my dinner plate arranged artistically. You're paying for a master chef to work his/her magic on the ingredients and serve them up to you. It's the same principle with these convergence gadgets. Yeah, you could throw together an old PC, knock together some Visual Basic scripts and set it on the floor next to your stereo, booting it up & logging in & running a script every time you want to listen to a Britney Spears song, but it's not as nice and slick as the convergence gadget you plug in and run with a custom-built handy remote control.
Try building one of these gadgets yourself. Work out the software and hardware problems without cheating and copying the interface of the gadget you're trying to emulate. Make it as slick as the commercial boxes and then let's talk about whether they are overpriced. Yeah, a TiVo or an UltimateTV or a ZapStation or an emPeg or an OpenGlobe looks easy to use (and therefore easy to build), but every one of these companies has thrown a team of engineers and artists at their products, and they've worked out a lot of problems that you probably wouldn't even think about for the first few months. Simplicity looks easy, but there's usually a lot of very hard work hiding behind it.