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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 $1500!" Here is a press release
that has a bit more details. It sure does seem overpriced for only a 40G
hard drive.
Well, judging by the difference in price of what this has and what my system at home has, they must have some seriously high quality audio stuff on it. Or are they just pandering to the music/gadget obsessives who think that more expensive means better?
By purchasing from SonicBlue you are supporting thier DVR patents, which are broad and unfair. Not that Tivo is much better by patenting similar items, but at the very least Tivo supports Linux, so they are the lesser of two evils (cause Micro$oft is in the mix now).
As for price, 1500 dollars is CRAZY, when competeing products with the same capabilities are half or less. Anyway, the wave of the future is networked audio, cause then you can just share out your PC, and we all know how freaking cheap PC storage is (can you say 3 or 4 100 gig RAID 0 IDE's, for about half the cost of the SonicBlue).
I don't understand why these companies can't come up with a product that would give the public what it wants... an all in one, home media server!
If there was a device that sold at somewhere close to TIVO price ranges, and could store video and mp3 audio, throw in an ethernet jack, some svideo and RCA hookups on the back so we could connect it to the rest of the entertainment system, and a DVD drive so I could stream DVD's over the home LAN, everybody and his brother would want one.
I don't think this type of product is too far fetched considering what you could already build from off the shelf commodity hardware and readily available free software. I know people are already working on hacking this type of device together.
The only people who are going to buy this thing for $1500 have too much money and too little understanding of what they are getting for the money.
Before you go whining about how "it's only a 40Gig hard drive" and "I can build the same damned thing for $19.95 using parts I found under my bed", take some time to look at this thing on their website.
$1500 is a whole lot of cash, but this thing offers a few other features, such as including a "RIO Receiver" in the package, and what looks to be a decent display on it. It also has ReplayTV-like capabilities to recommend music based on your listening habits. It doesn't even appear to be hobbled, since you can rip MP3 with it and transfer them to your PC.
Sadly, it looks like it uses a 56k modem to access CDDB, even though it has a 10mbps connection as well.
Sure, $1500 is a lot. But triple the storage space and drop the price to $1000, and I'm interested (in other words, by next summer I might have one...)
"Tomorrow's forecast: a few sprinkles of genius with a chance of doom!" - Stewie Griffin
This may sound like heresy, but a lot of people don't want the "fun" of configuring a computer as an audio server. I can imagine a lot of people who don't want to mess with some cranky old Windows machine just to listen to music. (It's probably also heresy to say that to most non-enlightened folk, "Computer" means "a PC running Windows")
Some of the features sound neat: 10x recording speed, USB download to MP3 players, CD burning, high-quality D/A converters, etc.
I would be worried about what happens to users and support once the RIAA decides this thing violates motherhood, apple pie, and their stranglehold on the music industry.
A lot of people complain about these convergence devices -- how they are too expensive or too restrictive, and say to just build your own. But I really haven't found too many people who have! So lets price one out. My personal requirements would be:
l e.php) fits the bill ($150).
- A case that doesn't look out of place in the living room, but provides enough expansion for adding DVR capabilities
- A soundcard with digital out for people with decent home theater equipment and capable of 24bit/96khz
For a case, I've narrowed it down to the InWin IW-FT620 (http://www.in-win.com/framecode/ino_ft620.html) ($55) or the Yeong Yang YY-9301 (http://www.yeongyang.com/products/yy9301.htm) ($?? can't find it for sale anywhere). Although I'm not too sure if these cases require low profile PCI cards....
As for a soundcard, the M-Audio Audiophile (http://www.midiman.com/products/m-audio/audiophi
I would also choose not to have a hard drive and boot off the network.
I think this could be put together for under $500. Extra slots could be used for a tv-out card to play DivX, or some kind of DVD hardware, or even a gigabit NIC.
Any thoughts?
By my calculations, assuming a 40 gigabyte drive, and a 650 hour storage capacity, and assuming MP3 fixed frame encoding, to be encoding their music at approximately 140 Kbit/sec.
At a 320Kbit/sec rate, it looks like one could encode about 285 hours of music. Substantially different.
Of course, not everyone feels the need to encode at such high bitrates.
The cost of the player still doesn't approach the cost of the music. 285 hours of music, making an assumption of 40 minutes for your average CD works out to about 427 CD's worth of music. At $12.99 per CD, that works out to $5,546.73 worth of music purchasing to put on the $1,500.00 player.
If you use their figure of 650 hours at approx 40 minutes for the average CD, you can store 975 CD's (at the lower bitrate), which would at $12.99 per album comprise a music cost to purchase of (brace yourself): $12,665.25.
Suddenly $1,500.00 for the player doesn't look too bad stacked up against the actual cost of the music.
Excuse me, I think I'm going to go enroll myself in consumer therapy now. I just calculated the cost of my own music collection over time at slightly higher than $12.99 per CD.