This is true. However, I recently was at an import car show (basically all souped-up Civics) and saw no Empegs. There is no reason the SB marketing machine could not have penetrated at least this niche group of people.

Actually, there are several reasons.

While generalizations are risky, I think this one holds true: That particular niche group is into COOL first, CARS second, and maybe, just maybe STEREO as a distant third -- and when they think stereo, they mean how many 12" speakers, how many kilowatts of amplifier can they cram into a Civic and how many decibels of bass can they produce. For that, they most assuredly do *not* need a $1000 audiophile-quality head unit. They don't even need a $199 audiophile-quality head unit that requires them to take their mega-bass CD home, load it into a computer, convert it into an MP3 file, and download it into their player before they can play it. All this after getting a computer, getting the ripping/encoding software, going through the learning curve of how to use it, installing and learning how to use the emplode and player software, learning how to do software upgrades... guys, that is one HELL of a lot of time and effort to go through just so you can play music in your car.

Unless someone is pretty seriously into music, and at the same time pretty seriously into computers, he is never going to "get it" as regards the empeg. The huge majority of car owners not only do not (and never will) understand the empeg, they don't need it and they wouldn't want it if you gave it to them for free! I mean, who would be foolish eough to want a player in his car that won't even play CDs, that you have to take into your house and hook up to a computer (a COMPUTER, for God's sake!) before you can even use it, that is so complicated to operate that even people who have used it for a year don't know how to do half the things it can do?

Well, at last count there were 1320 of us on this bbs who are "foolish" enough to want such a thing. I cannot imagine ever going back to the pre-empeg state of being. But if you think that the import car show you went to was a niche market... the niche that we bbs'ers are in is sub-microscopic. I wouldn't be surprised to find out that our sub-microscopic niche comprises a pretty large percentage of the total world-wide market for these highly specialized, highly sophisticated and difficult to use players. Think about it -- they had to reduce the price to about 1/4 of what it cost them to build them before even WE would buy out the remaining stock.

It is unfortunate that being the best does not necessarily imply commercial viability. I am not convinced that even an all-out marketing effort on the part of Sonic Blue could have given enough mass-market appeal to the empeg to sell them in quanitity at a price high enough to be profitable.

tanstaafl.