I had an empeg for about 2 years in my VW. But I recently bought an Audi allroad (A6) and wasn't willing to rip up the dash. PhatNoise is once again selling standalone PhatBoxes that integrate with factory systems and it seemed to be my best choice for getting more than 6 CDs worth of music in the car. It was a painful decision but as I thought about it I realized that, frankly, most of the bling bling features of the empeg have little value to me besides being cool. So I ordered the PhatBox fully expecting it to be a letdown after years of empeg use. So far I've been pleasently surprised and, dare I say, it does some things better than the empeg.

Obviously, where the PhatBox stands out is OEM integration (if they have one for your car). The PhatBox simply plugged into the prewired CD changer cable in the trunk and it worked. It took about 10 minutes (though I haven't permanently mounted it yet). The empeg would have required me to change every piece of the Bose factory system in addition to fabricating a new dashboard piece.

But what surprised me is how good the SSA interface is. For the basic job of picking music to play while on the road I find it superior to the empeg. SSA works through voice prompts and the cd changer controls. When you are browsing for music to play, CDs 2-5 correspond to different browsing modes. For example, selecting CD4 puts you in artist mode. Then you scroll through the artists with the track up/down buttons. PhatBox "speaks" the artists as you browse through them (or not if you are scrolling quickly). When you've found the artist you want you can simply stop and all of that artists tracks are queued up. Or you could then go to CD3 and you would be in album browse mode and you can pick the particular album you want as it speaks them. It's hard to explain and even PhatNoise doesn't do a very good job explaining it. I was pretty skeptical at first but it actually works quite well. I can completely control it with my steering wheel buttons and I never have to take my eyes off the road. I expected it to be slow but browsing with the voice prompts feels about the same speed as using the empeg's sideways scrolling menus.

The text to speach engine is pretty decent. They now use one from ATT which is much better than the MS engine they used to use. It pronounces most things correctly and the voice speaks at a good pace. (Ironically, one word it does mispronounce is PhatNoise. It pronounces it fat-nwah.)

The other neat feature of the PhatBox is the dynamic playlists that you set up using the PC software. In additional to the usual static collection of songs, playlists can be queries based on things like artist, title, genre, timestamp and the playlists are generated every time you sync the hard drive. I really like having a playlist that is the last 50 songs I've put on the drive. Multi-genre playlists are also nice.

Because the SSA interface has built in artist/album/genre browsing there is no need to maintain manually created playlists that correspond to these. I've always felt that it was ridiculous I had to maintain my own artist/album playlists on the empeg. The PhatBox Music Manager also syncs with a directory structure on my hard drive and the sync cradle is USB 2.0. These features will make it less time consuming to keep my collection organized and up to date.

This wasn't meant to be a post about which product is better or worse. I would still choose the empeg in a situation where I was willing to replace the entire factory system. But the PhatBox has been soundly dismissed on this board as a poor product when very few of you have ever used it. I wanted to post a counter opinion because I think it's a very well conceived and executed product given it's goal of OEM integration.

Flame away.

-Dylan