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Empeg Shipping
Vertigo1 writes "Empeg car player is now shipping. Their newsletter that was sent out yesterday stated that the registered users will be a first priority and then the production will commence to get them to whoever else wants them. Check it out here. " Must have... must have... They will be shipping out over the next few weeks-so if anyone wants to give me a late birthday present, uh...
One thing to keep in mind - that most people overlook - is that you're listening to your 128k/168k bitrate MP3s through a cheesy PC sound card, maybe an SB64, a 128Live, or whatever. The DSPs on the PC sound cards are not of professional levels, hence - you can afford an entire sound card for 100$.
:)
The empeg uses a much higher quality DSP. I have had the pleasure of listening to the Empeg decode and visualize MP3s in person on a Kenwood AC-3 Digital receiver with Bose surround sound and Klipsch subwoofer (we used the RCA outs that come on the Empeg - nice!!).
Rest assured, for all but the most anal audiophile, the sound that comes out on a 128k MP3 sounds great - I certainly couldn't tell the difference between mp3 and CD (although I am not a pro mind you...)
The main thing to consider is that you will be listening to this while you drive. There is already so much road noise in 99% of the cars out there that it negates any true audiophiles requirements for 'perfect audio'. The thing absolutely rules, I've got one of the first ones off the line coming my way and I couldn't be happier.
-Brian
This is the response which I got from the empeg guyz
:-) I was wondering that since you people use Linux in Empeg
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On Tue 30 Mar, Chirayu Patel wrote:
> I was just going through the empeg FAQ and found that my question is not
> answered.
> player, how much time does it take for the system to boot? More important -
> Do I have to wait for Linux to shutdown before I put of the car?
It takes 15 sec until it plays music. You don't need to shutdown, no,
you can just turn the ignition off/pull the power lead: it remembers
where it was in the tune & will carry on.
As a reference to all of the replies about 'telneting in' and 'no ethernet' and 'how open is it?'.
:)
I sat down with Hugo, plugged a cable between the serial port on the Empeg and the serial port on my linux box, and we "dialed up" the Empeg unit via Minicom.
You get a nice login prompt and a password, and you log right in. Since minicom supports Zmodem transfers, I'm sure you could send any software you wanted to send via Zmodem at null modem speeds of 128k/etc.
The system is very definitely open, and logging in is just one of the things you can do with it, but I watched Hugo make modifications to the 3D visualization code in VI, restart the player program, and then start playing MP3s again. A quick kill -9, edit the visualization code, save, restart, place mp3s, and so on. He was playing with a beta copy of the 3D code at that time, so some modifications were needed to make it run.
Suffice to say, the box is very much linux, and very much open. If you know linux well, you'll be able to do whatever you want.
As to "How much music per gig"-- when compressing my own .mp3 music, I find I get about a compression ratio of 10-12 to 1, depending on the music. Guessing 10:1, and figuring that a 600 MB CD holds about an hour of music (making the numbers easy. :) ), you can figure that 60 MB holds about an hour of mp3, so you can get about seventeen hours of music to a gig. (and as back-of-the-napkin as these figures are, your mileage _will_ vary.)
-F
The capacity is one of the easiest things to figure out, since mp3 uses a constant bitrate.
Assume it's compressed at 128kbps. That's 16 kB per second. A 4000 million byte hard drive (which isn't really correct, but close enough) can then hold 250,000 seconds of music. Which is 4200 minutes, or 70 hours of music. In general, it's about 1 minute per meg. Assuming an average song is 4.5 minutes, that's around 950 songs. Not bad!
well since the site's about as responsive as a tank under water, here's what you were looking for in any case -- the price list:
Empeg Car Player(Blue Display) including car mount, home PSU, cables & software:
4 Gb Disk - $1099
6 Gb Disk - $1199
10 Gb Disk - $1499
14 Gb Disk - $1699
28 Gb Disk - $2499
Alternative Colour Display (Green or Amber) - $20
Additional Slide Bay (for second vehicles) - $40
--
Rare Window - free your photos
I'm interested in this too - although presumably it's no different to a laptop that you'd have in your car, although I'm guessing that most people don't actually use their laptop while moving.
:)
,hacker Perl another Just)'
My guess is that these folks use quite a bit of caching (so they can park the head when not reading a song?), and shock resistance techniques, so that the result is a pretty robust little unit.
Still, I can't imagine them lasting as long as a normal car stereo (like 15 years+) - you'll probably have to keep replacing that hard drive.
Having said all that - I think it's a risk I'd love to take. There have been many weekend drives to Scotland (I live in the south of England - Scotland is a 9 to 11 hour drive - a drive I have to make about 8 times a year) where I've gotten sooooo bored of my music. If I could put this unit on the company as part of my company car that would be so cool
Matt.
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:
Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.
Internally, this runs a fairly standard (albeit small) Debian system. So the basic code is already open. He also said he will be GPL'ing the UI code. As far as extensibility, it has 8 megs of RAM, so I suppose that could be a limitation(?), but it's basically a Linux box. Telnet in and do your damndest. ;)
The main draw is probably that they're free, but it's not the only draw. I have no pirated MP3s, but I have made them from all of my CDs because it's a lot more convenient that way. Same with the empeg. Just press play and you've got a continuous stream of all your music without changing or carrying CDs. And I'm no audiophile, so a slightly lower quality isn't going to bother me. Of course, I don't have $1000 to blow, so I'm not going to get this.
Surely Rob deserves a unit for his birthday?
:-)
I'd say he's given you thousands of dollars worth of free publicity here, and obviously a healthy percentage of the Slashdot community is just salivating for the unit.
Don't be cheap. Give him one.
D
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Because of the fundamental physics differences in the way that tubes and transistors amplify, even a simple, cheap tube amp can often provide far better sound than a complex solid state amp. Tube amps are simple because their physics are simple - even a relatively complex tube amp has an order of magnitude fewer components than pretty much any solid state amp. Many of the components in a solid state amp are to correct for things that happen "in the bargain" with tubes.
Tubes are the perfect analog solution to a fundamentally analog problem - digital is NOT always better. Go read up about tube gear at the various web sites out there before making assumptions like that. Prediction: Analog will be big news in electronics sometime in the next few years. There are people working right now to shrink tubes to chip sizes, which would provide some very interesting analog signal processing capabilities to go along with the interesting DSP techniques we have gotten recently.
The guy that said, "Dude! Tubes ROCK!" had it right...
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
Umm, the telnet remark was kind of flippant. I didn't really mean it literally. As I said I was primarily interested in the hardware; I don't actually know if it's possible to telnet in (although I could swear I recall this being mentioned). However, the system is supposed to be accessible. The capability is certainly there. What the actual implementation is I don't know.
I have not seen anyone comment on the fact that this is not just a MP3 player, its a Linux System for your vehicle. It's open! That means you can add new software, or use it in ways other than it's original designers intended. It has a USB port and a Serial port as wel as IRDA ports. What kind of peripherals can you connect? I think you'll be seeing car control boxes that will interface to the Empeg soon. Or home use, have the Empeg control your entire Audio/Video stack using it's IR port.
It's about time that Audio and Video gear became Open, I'd love to be able to get into the embedded processors in my VCR and home Stereo, I could change the operating modes, fix annoying user interface bugs and do other cool hacks.
I'd like to get into my DSS box, not to steal service, but to redo the user interface, store an entire weeks worth of show descriptions and times so I dont have to wait for the next download. Improve the search engine, add multiple timers, etc.
Starman97@Gmail.com (bring it on spammers)