About a year ago I got the Neo rather than the empeg simply because I thought they were essentially the same thing, but the neo was cheaper. boy was I wrong!

I was wrong on all accounts. The Neo completely sucks. It's not even worth the materials it's made of in my opinion. I would have never bought one if I could have compared the 2 in real life. Not only that, but the Neo ended up being *more expensive* than the empeg. The Neo itself was only $400, but I had to put in about $500-$600 more just to get the damned thing installed; not to mention all the time I invested (I made a rough estimate of about 30-40 hours; even at minimum wage that's about $200).

Compare that to my empeg that just worked right out of the box, no fuss, no hidden expenses (well, except perhaps for an $8000 tuner on ebay). The empeg is certainly worth $999 (how much it cost when I was deciding between it and the neo), possibly even $1500.

I think the only thing the empeg guys could have done to get me to buy one back then isn't to add new features, but rather to convince me that it really is worth the price. Most car audio people do that by setting up in-store demos, but I suppose empeg doesn't exactly have the resources to do so. They could have also explained why the neo isn't really worth it, but that's not very nice marketing (and may be illegal, I dunno).

Unfortunately, the advantages of the empeg over the neo can't really be put in to words. It's just something you have to experience.
(yes, I'm very bitter about my neo. I put (almost) all my money into it, and got (almost) nothing out of it. If the prices of the empeg hadn't dropped, I would have never been able to get one. I count my lucky stars for that.)