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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 $1500!" Here is a press release
that has a bit more details. It sure does seem overpriced for only a 40G
hard drive.
Having already infuriated the entire television industry, SonicBlue was unsatisfied with it's level of legal disasters, so they have now gone and scared the bejeezus out of the RIAA.
Well done. I won't be surprised if the RIAA & MPAA just drop the pretext and break out the laser-guided bombs. Where's SonicBlue's headquarters?
--
What happens when you outlaw guns
Well, judging by the difference in price of what this has and what my system at home has, they must have some seriously high quality audio stuff on it. Or are they just pandering to the music/gadget obsessives who think that more expensive means better?
As long as SonicBlue can play the legal game just well enough to keep selling their boxes, the legal battles are free publicity for them. They get to ride the RIAA/MPAA-is-evil-let's-stick-it-to-the-man bandwagon all the way to the bank. If the opposition manages to actually prevent sales with an injunction of some kind, then they're in trouble.
Good luck.
Evan - needs to hit preview before submitting
By purchasing from SonicBlue you are supporting thier DVR patents, which are broad and unfair. Not that Tivo is much better by patenting similar items, but at the very least Tivo supports Linux, so they are the lesser of two evils (cause Micro$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.
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*/
Fight back...read the article here, without the blah blah blah part.
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
> 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.
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
---
Siggy, siggy, siggy, can't you see? Sometimes your puns just irritate me.
I can only assume from the pricepoint ($1500MSRP, so $1000+ street price, at least initially) that the average MP3-laden geek is not the target market here. In fact, the pricepoint may be one of the things that allows this thing to avoid (at least somewhat) some flak from the RIAA and its gang of enforcers.
:)
For an audiophile, this thing just might make some sense. First of all, the type of people who spend $300 on speaker wire are obviously not concerned with value per dollar. Second of all, such folks also cling to the ridiculous notion that the rotational stability of a CD is of key importance to audio quality, with typical ghetto-trash (read sub-$5000) CD players incapable of reproducing their music faithfully. For these folks, having a device that would play their music buffered from a hard drive (with the device stashed far away and connected with Monster Cable Ethernet would eliminate the need to worry about such things as spending thousands of dollars to isolate their hardware from any vibrations caused by their cat farting or toilet flushing. (That last link rules)
Seriously, a device that allows audiophiles to play their music from a non-CD platform, esp thru decent D/As, or even better, their multi-thousand dollar outboard D/As, would sell. The Linn Kivor, no doubt priced in the stratosphere, is one such example. My guess is that the SonicBlue DAC is about a tenth the price of the Linn.
Sooo, while I'm not going to rush out and buy one, I'd still say it may find a market with audiophiles.
-- "Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge." (Charles Darwin)
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." :)
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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
No, the software was developed in-house by the team-formerly-known-as-empeg.
Rob
-- Freddie Starr ate my empeg
Some people prefer a TV output, others demand that their hi-fi components run quite independently of their TV. Having both is also a possibility.
With this particular product we went the route of a local screen. It went down pretty well in consumer testing and beta testing.
It costs more to put a nice LCD screen on than it would to provide TV output so your pricing comment doesn't really make sense.
Rob
-- Freddie Starr ate my empeg
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
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?
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?"
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.