I made a new friend at the weekend, and spent some time telling him about my enduring passion, the empeg. He was pretty excited about it, in spite of the fact that he wouldn't be able to use it himself in it's intended environment, the car.

The reason for this is - he's blind.

He is able to browse the web, however, with a speech converter that allows him to "read" the content of a page. His standard entertainment is the radio, and digitised audio books that he plays back from his PC. MP3 is a well known technology for him - his trouble is that he cannot cart his PC with him to his parents, and so forth, or listen to them when he is being driven about. He knows of portable players such as the Rio, but their memory is insufficient for storing, say, a whole book. With the empeg, that's not an issue. Although there are maybe suitable portables around, the empeg is what fascinated him - he "got it" straight away.

So finally, to the point. He has the ability to listen at far higher speeds to the spoken voice than normally sighted people, and he uses the Kjofel player on his player on his PC to speed up the playback rate to around 50% higher than the normal speed.

A number of PC based players can do variable speed playback - it would be nice (for at least one potential owner anyway) if variable speed was an option.

PS. Tony - I had (by chance) my remote with me at the weekend, and he played with it a bit to see how to operate it. Unsighted, it took him about 10 minutes to learn each of the keys and had no trouble at all orienting it the correct way every time, or remembering the key functions. Oh, and we were pissed at the time too...

One of the few remaining Mk1 owners... #00015