First of all, let me say that, after a day of playing with empeg, I am very happy that I ordered it.

As seen in other forums, I have encountered several quite serious glitches (emptool does not work over serial, player reboots when emplode contacts it during Ethernet autodiscovery). If this was a mass market product, I would have been very unhappy; I would have probably felt ripped off. Why not now? Primarily because I am fully confident that guys@empeg (and others here) will help me sort the things out at no time at all, but also because I understand how complex this thingie is.

My first impression (out of the box) was that the product feels solid and professionally made. Details count: I got (correct) serial cable, ISO adapter etc neatly packed and labeled; every wire on the sled is properly labeled etc. That should be normal, but I have worse experience with some of the 'big' companies.

Manual definitively needs some more work. It glosses over quite a number of UI features, examples are scarce, and it is not up to date (remember Doug's secret handshake joke?)

Both player UI and empload are much easier and more intuitive to use than they sound from reading about them. Properly labeled remote will certainly help. I understand that emplode is not intended for serious tags maintenance, but that area could use some improvement, anyway (I think that many users already expressed this). A minor suggestion: keep original filename as a track info item.

Reaction of colegues, need for justification etc? About half were enthusiastic (non-geeks are impressed by capacity - after all, that is the main reason I bought it). Others also see its merits, but don't feel the need for having several hundred CDs worth of music always handy. One friend said something along these lines: 'Hm, $1500 is too much; I could do that cheaper, let's see: there are small PC motherboards, hm, I need laptop disks anyway, what about sound card shielding, VGA is out of the question, so I must improvise something, maybe FM RF modulator instead of wires and RDS for info, hm, where do i find those, then keypad.. No, $1500 is OK, after all.'

More as experience accumulates.

Cheers!

Dragi "Bonzi" Raos
Zagreb, Croatia
Q#5196, MkII#80000376, 18GB green