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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
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
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)
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
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
-- Freddie Starr ate my empeg
The problem with a "media server" is just how do you serve media? Until some form of home networking is ubiquitious (wireless, or ethernet), the media server will have to be a media client as well: quiet (i.e. fanless), spiffy case and display, come with a remote, and probably TV out for display. That kind of contradicts, "have mondo disk space for audio and video".
A media server is little more than a glorified file server, perhaps with the ability to read local CDs and/or DVDs, and download content from the internet. Like a furnace, or water heater, it doesn't have to look nice or be particularly quiet. Of course, as long as it's going to be network connected, it may as well be a caching news server, non-relaying mail server, and the ntp gateway for the house. It might even firewall for you, but I prefer a dedicated router/firewall for that.
Unfortunately the value that such a device provides only becomes apparent when you have (a) an always-on internet connection, and (b) a networked home: after all why bother loading all your CDs in a box in your entertainment centre, when they would be located in your entertainment centre anyway? Is it worth that much to not have to get up and change a disk? Even then, CD changers have gotten cheap. All the other functions that such a server can perform (oh, yeah, add answering machine), just can't happen without network connectivity.
The real value of a media server is that it sits out of sight, and can have more storage added as necessary, with media clients scattered around the house. CDs and DVDs can be archived out of site as well. DVR functionality belongs here too.
This simplifies what the media clients have to do... they basically become web browsers with audio and video outputs, and that's it. Some might have the ability to accept local media, but without local hard disk storage. Others might be fully integrated "receivers" with audio amplifier sections. Still others might be "televisions" with ethernet ports. But the common theme is to get the content stored elsewhere, whether streamed remotely, or cached on a media server in the home.
Its a great dream, and one that I've had for a while -- I'm only now slowly starting to set up an uncompressed audio server, and will likely DivX encode my VHS tapes. But, for most homes, I suspect it won't become a reality until always-on network connections are the norm (so the other services can be provided), and traditional legacy devices start to be network aware (whether wired or wireless).
You could've hired me.
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.