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Empeg Shipping 112

Posted by Hemos from the and-it-looks-neat-cool dept.
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...
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Empeg Shipping

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  • Re:damn. Thought the stats were better (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Ok, so let's get this straight. You drive your car at a temperature where your breath will not only condense, but stands a good chance of freezing? Of course you don't. You have a heater.

    The temperature is a non-issue unless you are mounting the unit in a soft top sports car with the roof open in a New England winter.

    As for 150G. Let's just say that if you went through that your feet would be about 12' higher than your ears and the rest of you would be fairly chunky jelly.

    150G is effectively the drive landing on a concrete floor from 20' up. Not a problem. You'd be dead before the machine would.

    Please notice: These things have a 250MHz StrongArm on board which makes them only a little slower than a Corel/HCC/Rebel Netwinder. Or about as quick as a P233.

    They will be software upgradable as new standards arrive and you will be able to stuff your 4 petabyte disks in as soon as they arrive in 2.5" form factor.

    28GB = 3 weeks of continuous, non repeating music. Way cool.

    Personally, I want to get hold of one of these things and run X on the front panel. The front panel is a Linux Framebuffer!
  • 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

  • To me, at least, the best thing about the whole in-car mp3 player deal is that it's all hard-disc thrown. So, instant access to any of the tracks in the database, with no seek times or clunking of CD-changers. It makes random play across 2,500 or so tracks instant!

    That being said, the Empeg works out pretty pricy, but since when was the first commercial product in a marketplace ever cheap? Admittedly, I use a player built out of (mostly) used PC parts, but it sure is a hell of a lot more boot space than an Empeg would!


    Jules
  • 150G will probably do for most applications. Keep in mind that there's more to the shock rating than just hitting potholes, there is also a vibrational component.

    To put these numbers in perspective, the engine computers I design must withstand a 20g vibrational spec and a 100g shock speck and operate from -40C to 85C.
  • They accidentally sent out blank emails last night.
  • This is the response which I got from the empeg guyz

    ------------------------------------------

    On Tue 30 Mar, Chirayu Patel wrote:
    > I was just going through the empeg FAQ and found that my question is not
    > answered. :-) I was wondering that since you people use Linux in Empeg
    > 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. :)
  • I heard about the EMPEG player before I heard about slashdot.. In fact, it was trying to find out more about this really cool-sounding device that I had to go slogging through Slashdot, and eventually fell in love with the place. So SOMETHING good's come out of the wait...


    Unfortunately, it has been nearly a year since this little item was announced. In that time, I've had a Christmas, a bunch of travel, and a whole other bunch of the typical "life things" get my monetary attention, and after a while, when you're waiting for months and months for the holy grail of a piece of consumer electronics, you start to lose faith. The upshot is, as soon as this announcement came, I ended up cancelling my queue position.


    Maybe later this year, I'll buy one, but looking at how we were treated, I'm sorry, this was one of the worst handled product introductions I've seen. Yes, I know the toughness of just jump-starting an entire production run of such a complicated item, but we were promised bi-weekly updates, and someone couldn't be bothered to write a simple "here's what's up" to everyone putting thousands of dollars up? Months would go by without a decent update. All in all, it left a very bitter taste in my mouth.


    I wish the gang the best of luck, and I have no doubt they will be millionaires by the end of the year, but not with my money (yet).

  • They're using linux as the OS for this thing but I thought linux's USB support wasn't anywhere near complete. If not, how are they doing it?
  • I'm not so sure about the Sony part, one I doubt they would make one, and if they did I'm sure I wouldn't buy one for one reason. Sony is a large record label, so _IF_ they did make one I'm sure there would be lot's of neat restrictions on it like their neat copy once protection on consumer Dat decks.

    matguy
    Net. Admin.
  • well it has USB right? Now the only trick is getting the neat USB to Ethernet adapters to work with it. OK, problem solved.

    matguy
    Net. Admin.
  • the only thing I hate about my company motorcycle is that I can't fit something like this in. Well at least not so that it looks good and won't be stolen after two days in London.
  • don't tell me you're thinking of CE? Does it have any multimedia support to speak of anyway much less a mp3 player?

    matguy
    Net. Admin.
  • Oh I agree completely, tube amps rock.

    My first thought was sweeping all those little pieces of class off of the car floor though.

    I don't think I said digital is always better. Quite the opposite, I actually am a tube amp fan for hi-fi.

    My point was only that it's unlikely to find a "cheap tube amp" in a car stereo nowadays, since you can buy solid state amps on chips (practically) off the shelf for way cheap.

  • Theoretically with these hard drive based mp3 players, you can encode at high bitrates. I read an article where mp2 was preferred over mp3 at high bitrates because it drops fewer details. I bounced some mp2 and mp3 recordings around to see which one degraded faster and the mp3 recording fell apart long before the mp2 recording.
  • Mp3 from a 386? hmm Mp386! a new standard is born, I better register that domain before anyone else does...oh, oh my...., or is it already taken?....eek, must hurry now.....

    matguy
    Net. Admin.
  • good, I'd hate to wait for full fsk on 2 14 gig drives, ughhh

    matguy
    Net. Admin.
  • I can understand that too, but it's convienince and file size, but if you really want to get picky go all the way back to full .wav's. Also keep in mind that you are doing compression, decompression, comp...etc. So anything will fall apart after enough transfers, try taking a cd, ripping it, burning it, and take a look a few generations down, it will eventually fall apart and there's no compression, you loose bits from scratches and such that you never notice because the d/a corrects for these errors to a point untill they build up on top of each other and no amount of error correction can patch it back together reliably since it is trying to fix things that have already been fixed once or more times before, same with repeated comressions to decompressions, it's almost like taking a story and passing it through a few people, see what comes out the other end, it's pretty amusing how different it is. But then again why are we decompressing them to back and forth for our empeg anyway?

    matguy
    Net. Admin.
  • "...at an 168K bitrate."

    Do you really need that high of a bitrate? I get a virtually perfect[1] reproduction of the CD track at only 56kbps.

    (No troll, just an honest question.)

    1: Not quite perfect because of the MPEG algorhythm, but I couldn't hear any artifacts regardless of genre or volume.
  • And just think, with serial and USB ports, you could plug in a cellular modem and a keyboard, call up your ISP and read /. while doing 80mph (130km/h) down the expressway.
  • You're not gonna find a cheap class D amp. Advent makes one, although I forget the model number(s) offhand. I think there's another mobile audio company that makes a ClassD, but i'm not positive. If not for the price, they're great - esp. for mobile installs. Small, efficient, cool operating temp... Anyway, there's also a company that makes a tube amp for mobile applications. They used some cushioning around the tubes to take up some of the shock, but the people spending the money for that kind of amp aren't gonna put it in their 4x4. :) As a side note, anyone runing their whole car system on the head unit's built-in amp isn't getting the sound they oughtta be getting, IMHO.
  • you would also have to wonder about the cars you'd put this in. Personally, my camaro would probably eat one alive with all of the potholes here in good ole ohio.... I would rather put one in a car that I would know would handle shock well for me, because in a really stiff car, I'm sure you can hit in the hundreds of g's.... ka-wham... (not intentionally, of course, accidents do happen...)
  • As far as shock-resistance is concerned, I believe they've tried fairly hard to deal with it as an issue. The drives are on shock-absorbent mountings, and they cache tracks in memory before spinning-down the drives.

    However, I'm not sure this is as big an issue as you might think - I've had an mp3 player bumping around in the back of my car for 6 months or so now, and I've only just lost one HDD (which, actually, I don't think was killed by shock, so much as a PSU that went nuts on me). That wasn't shock absorbed in any way at all, either.

    Jules

  • Wouldn't want to be running it thru some tube amp

    DUDE!Tube amps absolutely rock! Why on earth would you not want to run it through a tube amp?

    Putting a tube amp in the same category as pc speakers is just wrong.

  • Yeah!

    I would love to get one of these things for my truck (or even build one) - if I could only afford it. I live in Phoenix, AZ - where interior temperatures during the summer can actually cook food. I also like to drive "rough" in my truck (mountain trails are fun - I also tend to think of curbs as a minor annoyance) - so I have to wonder about this. Plus, in the winter, I can drive a couple of hours north and be in a snowy wonderland (with freezing temperatures).

    This has always been the sticking point with me on getting a computer in my truck (I don't want just MP3s - I want engine monitoring, GPS, etc) - how to protect it and the drive. Mounting the drive on springs (like MP3CAR) would be OK, but the heat/cold? Especially the heat (the cold would be easy) when parked at the mall or something...
  • Have you seen any real evidence of this openness? I've been checking their site every couple of weeks since last year and I haven't seen anything real. Since the unit is in production you'd think they'd have released the software and specs by now.

    Are they selling hardware or software? If they're selling hardware then why be so tight with the software.

    The UI is supposed to be in Python, so it ought to be fairly cross platform, right? I've been debating whether to buy an empeg. One of the deciding factor is the interface and how easily I can customize it. I'll wait to see and SDK before I buy an empeg.
  • Hugo has made this point in a couple of interviews; it would be a shame just to use it for MP3's. Anyone else who's listening; we need the convergence of the PDA and the Rio type devices! Nice IBM microdrive in them, and hours of music plus email and an address book; yum :-)
  • Yes, I'm also curious about this. Did they have to write a lot of their own USB handling code? Also, will it be possible to transfer songs from my home Linux box to the EMPEG using USB?
  • Yes, but your PC won't be as small, cute, and definitely (at that price) won't be using laptop drives to make the 28Gb storage. Laptop drives, especially top-end ones, are NOT cheap - remember, they usually go in $4000 laptops, like the high-end thinkpads.

    You need 2.5" drives in a mobile platform: 3.5" drives are designed with one parameter in mind: cost. The price competition is cutthroat. 2.5" drives are designed with a different parameter: ruggedness. Transfer speed & price are secondary in the mobile market.

    Hugo
    empeg


  • I'm planning on using Mission's Freeway amp [mission.co.uk], as I own two of their HiFi Amps (Cyrus2, and a Cyrus3i + PSX-R), and think they're excellent (unlike their web site).

    As for speakers, maybe Mission's, but I'm going to make sure I can audition them first - I've also had Rockford-Fosgates recommended.

  • I did promise one to ./ at linuxexpo, but I think CmdrTaco is fighting to have it ;) (I've got a pic of him kissing one of the prototypes...)

    You never know, we *do* love slashdot here :)

    Hugo
    empeg
  • What I was implying is that when it's a consumer item - when people like Sony jump on the bandwagon - the price becomes reasonable as the competition for the consumer buck heightens. Just look at what happend in the console market. Consumer product dominated by Nintendo, along come Sony and their neat little playstation, bang. Market leader and reasonable prices across the board. The same happens in every electronic fad that makes it to consumer land.
  • Erm. I crashed my CRX with one of the prototype empegs running in the dash.

    Ok, ok, so it was only maybe 5mph (new bonnet, new bumper, new lights), but I wasn't really out to prove the shock tolerance at the cost of my insurance bonus ;)

    Hugo
    empeg
  • The base install (player diskimage) doesn't run debian - it's just our player, our own /sbin/init, and glibc-2.1.

    The developer install (developer diskimage) has the usual bash, gzip, rz, sz, tar, etc and boots to a bash# prompt.

    You can switch between images anytime you feel like it, and you have a 32mb partition to do with as you please. You can install & run PPP on the serial or irda if you want, and run inetd/in.telnetd for access to the unit.

    Hugo
    empeg
  • If you are out on the road and the system crashes (it's a computer, they all crash from time to time) then would you have to wait until you got home to fix it? Is there a keypress sequence to reboot the system? Would you need to login to the system?
  • The 28 gig model is worth the same amount as my whole car! Oh well, I'll just drool. Hopefully these will take off, these guys will make a fortune for such a cool device, and the prices will drop after a while.
  • I've been on the waiting list for quite a while now - I'm number 396 - and I happen to be in the UK right now! I gave them a call thinking I might be able to pick mine up before I leave, but alas, they won't be ready until after I've left!

    Doh!

    Can't wait to put it in my new car...
  • 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
  • Posted by Unit_52:

    Yeah, nice idea, but I dont think It'll take off, I mean, do we have room for another format? Minidisk is having enough trouble breaking into the market, why should peaple buy this too?
  • 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!

  • here's the pricelist [/. effect claims another] (Score:3)

    by schmack ( 32384 ) on Wednesday June 09, 1999 @04:47AM (#1859169)
    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
  • Let's see... I just priced a linux box with 24 gig storage and a Sound Blaster AWE64 sound card--it came out to $875

    Now if someone would just make a nice little MP3 control panel to stick in my dashboard...

    http://www.indybox.com/cgi-bin/XAMD.pl
  • Anyone have $2500 I can borrow? ;)

    Matt
  • I make MP3's of my CD's and burn them to a CDR at an 168K bitrate. A CDR is 650MB.

    I tend to be able to put 8-10 albums on a single CDR. With a 6-7GB drive, you should be able to store 90-110 albums. WHEE!

    jf
  • How much music per gigabyte? That is, how many six-odd minute songs could we fit on a 4, 6, 10, 14 and 28 gigabyte disk? I'm sure this is in the FAQ, but since the site's slashdotted, I can't find it :-(.

    One important note from the site - the 4-14gb capacity systems can be expanded by adding an additional drive; the 28gb system is two 14gb drives. So if you want to get the ultimate capacity, buy one 14gb system and wait for the larger capacities to come out.

    D

    ----

  • MP3 is not having any of the adoption trouble that minidisc is encountering. Have you not noticed MP3.com and the scores of MP3 players out there? Besides, it's not a competing medium; it's more like audio tapes to vinyl -- sure, people pirated and bootlegged music after audio tape became available, but records still sold. With MP3, people are bootlegging music and playing it on their computers, but it's not the death of music sales.

  • With these prices (for the moment), is this product _really_ needed? I mean, the main attraction of MP3s are that they're free. This product would seem to throw that advantage out the window. Combine that with the fact that CDs _do_ have better quality then MP3s, and I'm wondering whether it's worth it to pay the price of a cheap computer to be able to play MP3s in your car.

    This also seems to be a bit of a backwards leap. I've been hearing for months that plans are "in the works" by CD player manufacturers to allow normal CD players to play CDs with songs encoded in MP3 format. I don't know how reliable those claims are, or how close the companies are to marketing this technology, but it seems to me that this would be much more advantageous then shelling out over a grand for an additional peripheral.
  • heh.. the 4 gig model is worth than my car.
    (-;

    Don't mock the '87 K-Car

  • >Thinking mp3's won't hurt record sales (note that >this hurts the artist too, not just the
    >company) is foolish.

    The impact that mp3 has on an artist is infinitely less than the impact that the record label has on the artist. Any aspiring artist has a lot more to fear than mp3 when negotiating a record deal. artists are guaranteed a certain amount of points
    that is a certain amount of cents(not dollars!) per record sold) with bonuses for various precious metals gold, plat etc. The average new artist must prove himself before he ever gets any sort of
    real comp. in relation to time put in. The average (last time I heard) is around 5 cents per record for a new artist, multiply that by a million records (if you're good)subtract legal fees, basic provisions and a new house for mom and see what you have left. Multi-platinum artist(well once upon a time) Toni Braxton filed for bkrptcy after two albums also TLC and I have seen countless one-hit wonders who release an album and don't have a dime to show for it! mp3 is good because it gives potential artists a venue to gain popularity and perhaps get just a few more points.
  • Well note that the tape/record situation was pre-internet. People would buy records because it was hard to tape them and if nobody you knew had the record you couldn't tape it. Now you can go to an FTP site and fill up your hard drive with ease. Thinking mp3's won't hurt record sales (note that this hurts the artist too, not just the company) is foolish. The best thing mp3 does now is let people discover unsigned, unpromoted artists who aren't losing money because they never would have sold anything anyways.
  • 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.

    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(\)-: ,hacker Perl another Just)'
  • FYI, a 12-20 mph collision (a fender-bender in other words) can *easily* produce 200-300G at the frame (not what the passenger 'feels' --what the structure does).

    I certainly hope they have some good absorbers on that HD...
  • I remember there was a posting on /. about mp3 decoding add on boards which could be attached to the serial port ...so even a x386 could suffice as a mp3 player. If I remember right those boards had to be assembled at home and one could only buy the kit.

    Would appreciate if anyone has more info about places selling assembled boards?

    tnx
    CP
  • Heh, I think any cheap amp you get nowadays is going to be digital internally.
    Admitedly there are good and bad from both groups, but it's hard to find bad cheap tube amps anymore becuase better transistor amps are so much cheaper.
    Tube amps generally mean audiophiles. Or guitars =]
    I'm guessing the empeg has some amplification internally, so drop some cash on a standard second stage and some decent speakers (and a sub if you are one of those types =)
    An actual full digital amp would require a digital output, which the empeg doesn't appear to have. In fact I know of few pc devices (alesis, sb gold) that have such an output...
  • I talked to Hugo a bit about this at LinuxWorld. My main interest was actually the hardware, so details will be sketchy.

    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. ;)

  • Yes, it's been a long time: yes, we did think we could get it done sooner than we have - but we didn't try to mislead anyone, and have always been responsive (usually 24 hours, maybe more when we get ./'ed) to email.

    We've not even done the official launch yet; we don't believe in vapourware and we have never wanted to promise stuff which just wasn't going to happen and the disappoint a lot of people.

    To come clean: we're really not marketing types. We're geeks, and we love making cool toys. We don't have a smooth-talking PR department and are pretty much stretched to the limit at the moment (we've got some more people starting work for us soon though, which should help a lot!).

    Sorry if you felt let-down, hopefully you'll still love the product when you see one and fall in love again :)

    Hugo
    empeg
  • Oops ... Hemos it is.

    Sorry about that.

    D

    ----
  • The USB on the unit is a USB slave - much more simple than a USB host like a PC has (hosts can only talk to slaves, so it needed to be this way around). The code is in our kernel patch - we've just patched up to 2.2.9 - it should hit the SA-1100 patchset pretty soon.

    We've not played with the new USB host support in linux yet, but it looks much simpler than the old UUSB stack.

    Hugo
  • Ah, very nice, perhaps then I can go in, delete Linux, and install some alternate operating system. Or is it really this open? I can't get to the website, of course.
  • Also, I have no clue about the shock absorption. What does your everyday pothole do? How about your typical train tracks?

    Just to let you in on shock, An ejection seat in a fighter plane, which is essentially a rocket up your clacker, will do 60G's for half a second. A pot hole is going to be far less than the maximum allowed. The problem will be with repeated oscillations (constant banging up and down). This will seriously affect the ability to play music off any medium except solid state (memory cards etc.) Therefore train tracks are less likely to cause a problem than say a long corrugated road.

    Anyone have any clue what import and taxation fees would be included?

    None, customs would charge you sales tax when it entered the country, and low volumes are exempt on import duty.

    I really want one of these, but I'm gonna wait another year, and see if some better stuff comes along (instead of just the first ones), and hopefully prices will become more reasonable, too.

    You said it. When Sony start making them, then I'll buy one.
  • Unfortunately there is no such thing as a "digital" amplifier. People throw this word around because its todays buzzword, and they don't really know what they're talking about. Processing may be done digitally, but when its time to pump current to speakers, yer talking analog baby, and thats never gonna change. Its not a bad thing either.
  • Here's the cool thing about the K-Car's, they have a din and a half (about) radio. This means much more space to mount a good control panel and screen, I've been contemplating it with my '86 K-Car, but then I would actually have to lock the doors, and what fun would that be?

    matguy
    Net. Admin.
  • There's also a heat factor, in a car you would most likely have less cool ventilation, especially before the ac kicked in on a warm day sitting in the sun if it is in the car and you'd be screwed if it was in the trunk unless you lived in Alaska or something. Moblie hard drives have much less heat generation and usually have a wider tollarance for heat extreemes. As well as power consupmtion, but that's pretty much negligable unless you are planning on using some old 5.25" full hight 24watt drives, but then you'd have to turn it up all the time to overcome the sound of the damned drives.

    matguy
    Net. Admin.
  • If I remember right tube amps create all harmonic distortions in the even orders with are actually pleasing to the human ears, also when a tube amp is overdrivven they clip much different than transistor apms. Transistors harshly cut the wave where tubes round it flat to make the disrotion not as harsh and much easier on speakers and ears (remember that a low powered amp will blow a speaker much faster than a overpowered amp when driven to high levels.) If Tube amps were so bad they wouldn't be sold anywehre, it's not like they're cheaper than their trasistor counterparts. Although I do have to agree with all the other reasons you state, most of which relate directly with car installation of a tube amp, other than price which applies everywhere, although if you're buying an empeg you are already shelling out some cash.

    Also you asked about digital amps earlier, the only thing that is close to that that I know of are the d-class amps that Infinity put out a number of years ago. They were an interesting amp that worked somewhat on the AM radio principal and were extremely efficient and small for the power they put out, but were doomed due to the reletively high distortions they caried, but you would almost never hear the distotions while driving, but people care about numbers. As far as a good amp, just use the same prinicpals that fit any good car stereo installation, since it has pre-amp rca out-puts I imagine there is no internal amp (would have heat and space issues that they wouldn't want to deal with.) So nothing else really changes, it's still a car stereo.

    matguy
    Net. Admin.
  • I would imagine the only way you could say that you have a digital amplifier would be to have the d/a be the output stage, but that would be a tricky chip design putting out lot's of heat. It would be rather expensive as well, but there's a techno freak sucker born every second, so you do the math.

    matguy
    Net. Admin.
  • 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.
  • I recieved a blank email from them, figgered it was about something going on, and yet, when I checked the web site, nothing had been changed for awhile. Still no pictures of the "finished" productions units, just pictures from 3/30/99.

    It would be great to see the finished units.
  • What about having 28GB of my own CD's encoded and ready to play in my car? That's something completely new and exciting that MP3/Empeg offers. I'm not breaking any laws by encoding my own CD's.
  • Most MP3 encoders use constant bitrate, but the MP3 spec allows for bitrates to change midfile. Xing's newer encoder has VBR, and winamp and sonique will read these VBR files. Any linux players support VBR? Does Empeg?

  • According to the web site - I think it's newsletter six, the one before the one advertised here - they did extensive shock testing and the unit being tested still works and is in use now. And that was with caching turned off.

    D

    ----
  • Well as far as it goes for me, I find myself buying more music as a result of mp3. I'll find a single song, or listen to mp3spy, and realize I haven't heard their stuff before and really like them. I bought four albums as a direct result of this last week. I would not have bought these if it wasn't for being able to hear mp3's of them. Recoil, Curve, Placebo, Legendary Pink Dots, Einsturzende Neubauten, I never hear any of these on the local radio, or anything like them for that matter.

    My friend ken is an example of the person who incessantly searches ftp & web sites for mp3's. He needs to write a new CD about every 2-3 months. How has this changed his music buying habits you ask? Well he probably buys five or six cd's a year, the same as before. The artists aren't losing any cash from him.

    As far as declining sales in any particular age group, it probably has more to do with how corporate rock has sucked the life out of the music industry. Corporate radio has almost completely removed any choice you might have from the equation. Almost all the station follow a top 40 format and replay their song list at least 3 times a day. Hopefully the FCC will go through with their Low Power FM Radio Broadcasting [fcc.gov] plan so we can have decent radio available.
  • Isn't it going to be awfully small for X?

    And doesn't a car take a little while to heat up in the winter? It's not an issue for me since I live in Southern California, and 41 degree temperatures are extremely rare, but for those who live in freezing climates, I guess you'd have to get into your car, make sure the unit was off, and then drive without music until the heater warmed up the car. Not too cool.

    D

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  • Check out http://www.mp3car.com for full info on building a mp3 car.....it can be done cheaply, and there is a guy out there that has a frontend for xamp, and has made a svga driver to work with a certain vid card....there is lots of ways to do it.... :)
  • 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

    ----
  • You can't telnet in, there's no Ethernet!

    This, in my mind, is the most glaring oversight in the Empeg. It would sure be nice just to be able to plug the car into the Ether (my hub's in the garage, anyhow ;-)) and move music, etc. around that way.

    I wrote them about that a while ago - apparently, they are worried that if they provide some reasonably easy way to slurp music off the thing, they'll run afoul of the RIAA gestapo...
  • You say telnet in and do your damndest, but is that really possible? There's no console and no floppy drive, so if it isn't running a telnet daemon on the serial port when you get it you're at a dead end.

    I suspect that the production models will not have a telnet daemon running. It's a catch-22. It doesn't matter if it's running Debian if you can't get to a shell prompt then it's basically a closed system (maybe in violation of the GPL).
  • You wouldn't want to use a tube amp in a mobile setting anyway, they don't like vibration too much.


    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...

  • Remove foot from mouth...

    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.

  • but if your other OS runs on StrongARM there's nothing stopping you.
  • Definitely. In February I bought a 10g drive for my thinkpad. cost me 1100 dollars (luckily I was able to expense it). Current price is about 380. If you need it, as I did, the price was well worth it. Its just better now.....


    matt
  • Info from the /.'d site:

    Operating temperature range, digital music mode

    5 deg. C to 55 deg. C Operating temperature range,
    radio mode only -20 deg. C to 60 deg. C

    Humidity, operating 10% to 90% RH, non-condensing Humidity,

    non-operating 5% to 95% RH, non-condensing Shock,
    operating 150G Shock,

    non-operating 400G


    The interesting part to me is the temparature range, and the shock. 5 degrees celsius is 41 degrees fahrenheit for those of us that live in the US. That means that for at least four months of the year, we can only listen to the radio, unless you live in florida or somewhere warm. That's kinda crappy. How bout a tiny onboard heater for that thing?

    Also, I have no clue about the shock absorption. What does your everyday pothole do? How about your typical train tracks?

    Anyone have any clue what import and taxation fees would be included? The site doesn't say. I really want one of these, but I'm gonna wait another year, and see if some better stuff comes along (instead of just the first ones), and hopefully prices will become more reasonable, too.
  • 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.
  • Well, as far as the temperature goes: you could warm up your car before bringing the unit in.

    It seems to me the idea is that you pop this thing in and out when you get in and leave your car. I wouldn't want this thing left in the car alone anyway: it's not theft resistant.

    I am concerened about how it would handle shock. If I could be convinced this thing is sturdy, I'd consider it. As it stands I'm looking at the MD's for the car (already have the stereo and portable).

  • Certainly you turn on the heater in your car during the winter, no? Turn on the car, let it warm up a bit (as you should do anyway in cold weather, to reduce undue engine stress and wear), and turn on the Empeg. No problem...
  • I don't know about any of the others, but xaudio didn't support VBR in it's current 'release' versions, as of a coupla weeks ago.

    However, they have a beta version of their SDK which contains the xaudio and rxaudio apps, which certainly _DO_ support it (as the mp3 player in the back of my car can attest). The apps themselves appear to be rock-solid stable, so all's well there. It's also free for non-commercial use.

    The betas can be found at http://www.xaudio.com/sdk/beta - you'll need, however, the username and password which are on the bottom of the SDK license agreement, which is available from http://www.xaudio.com


    Jules

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