Who has an Empeg/RioCar installed in a vehicle?

Here we are, about a decade and a half on, and the Big Question is:

Who (still) has a player (Empeg/RioCar) installed in one or more vehicles?

I did have one installed in my previous Subaru Impreza. In my current Impreza I've installed a cheap JVC headunit and am relying on Bluetooth from my iPhone to provide music.

I do in theory have an easy install to add an empeg, there is a spare slot under the JVC headunit that has a cubbyhole at the moment. Hopefully one day I get round to installing it. I do have the amp I used for the install in my previous Impreza, though I imagine this time I'd probably just use the aux in on the JVC.

I'll not be bother to try and install one in the Passat, far too much of a hassle.

I'm down to one Mk1 languishing in a drawer. I probably won't install it anywhere.

The gal that bought my 240 is using the empeg in it tho.

One in the Morgan, one in the Bristol, one Mk 1 in an old military radio bag for the Pikie, and one in a 19" rack for the electronic warfare truck. Oh, and a bunch of Rio Receivers still in daily use (but emulating squeezeplayers).

Still running in my '67 Mustang. Only now the VFD display looks primitive compared to modern screens so it looks like it could have come in the car.

Well, I don't know if this really qualifies as an "installation" or not... I had a metal box made up with a "foot" on the bottom bent at about a 30-degree angle so I could bolt it to the storage cubby of my center console. (Cost me $12). There is an auxiliary input jack located about four inches away to connect iPhones, ipods, empegs, etc. I salvaged a power cord from a dead router power supply, tied it in to the cigarette lighter circuit and ran it under the carpet to the empeg. Nothing fancy, but it works.

tanstaafl.

Never looked into adding it to the Mazda3. Currently my empeg is out on loan, it had gathered dust for two long and deserved to be used.

I still have one RioCar installed in my Passat. It started to have the "No hard disk found" last winter (I think it was), so I touched up the IDE connector and installed an SSD.

I like Doug's centre console installation -- definitely counts as an "install", one that might be easily done in other vehicles with "difficult" dashboard assemblies.

Here, we have several empegs, one of which is now buried deep inside the dash of the 2013 Impreza, using a 32GB CF card (instead of a mechanical hard disk) at present. There's a 64GB IDE SSD sitting on the worktable here to replace that at some point.

The rest of the players are in Home Docks around the house.

Since I got rid of my Alfa 2 years ago, I haven't used my Empeg in the car anymore. I can't install it into my Renault Clio or Opel Zafira without going though a lot of hassle, so I didn't try. I had good hopes for Jon's RPi Empeg project since that would make the install much smaller and therefore hopefully easier to do, but it seems that project just stopped. (I think?) Using the display extender we all know might be an option, but I don't really want to pull my entire dash apart in order to install it. So for now I'm using my iPhone via it's Bluetooth connection in order to stream A2DP audio to the headunit of my cars. Works pretty good, but nowhere near the Empeg experience.

Mine lives in my Dock on my stereo. (Do people still have stereos?)

-jk

I do I do!

I have two docks. One that I made myself, and one of Mark Lord's awesome docks.

I still have my 'peg in my car, and also I can dock it in two places in my house.

I still own a remote display kit which I haven't opened yet, just because I am fearing that this will come to pass for me too, when I need to get a new car which will make the install difficult.

Not a Renault or an Opel though.

Ditto, in preparedness, as whatever might replace the 206 RC might not have an easy DIN slot. But for now one of the empegs still gets exercised daily.

Lots of them with dual 250GB drives in cars and around the house.

Still a good product, nothing out there yet to replace it.

Ross

I have two one thats in house ,and other thats in my Toyota , Land Cruiser 90, 2003, Whis there was a way to upgrade it !
You know faster Ethernet mostly.

I still have mine in my Impreza, but then I have had the car from new since 1998. I expect it won't be going in the replacement car though, whenever that happens.

Still have mine in a 1997 Mustang Cobra. A Bluetooth capable Pioneer feeds radio and Pandora from an Android phone.. But the player gets some use too. Bit of alternator whine that I never worked out, the knob doesn't register correctly, the DC ignition sense diode is dead, and I occasionally get the HD not found error, but it generally works well and still provides plenty of entertainment on long trips. Probably hasn't been sync'd in 8 or more years. MkIIa, used to have two docks but now just the one. Remote, power cord. Still remember it arriving many years ago!

Yup, still have mine installed in the Renault Megane CC I bought in 2004 and am still driving.

It's still in perfect working order, original harddisks and all. The display has become quite faint though and is impossible to read in anything but darkness.

Just sort of inherited (friend moved back to Australia) a 2001 Alfa 156 station wagon, so looking at yet another install...

Still running mine in my '03 GTI:

http://i.imgur.com/01kka1p.jpg

Guitar pick is there to stop the handle from rattling

Two still installed:
1) 95 Ford E350 turbodiesel 4x4, mk2 and van has 278,000 miles and 13+ yrs.
2) 1954 Willys CJ3B jeep, really glad empegs are removable, it gets parked on the street in LA and empeg would be gone years ago.
3) last empeg, spare, in original box, never opened.

I have currently 2 (1) MkII & (1) MkIIa, I swap them back and forth in same vehicle.
Like as been said many times before haven't found anything close to replacing it.

I currently have 2.5 empegs (my elder brother and I share a backup unit, so he has 1.5) with one in my Forester, and one that has been removed from my wife's Impreza - has yet to be installed in something else, and 2 docks - one in my home office and one downstairs.

Docks count? Boom! I have one in my Lordly Dock... (And my kids thank you! They get first choice of music. For now, anyway...)

-jk

Had mine in my 08 Honda Ridgeline, till I got T-Boned at an intersection last November.

As soon as the weather gets warmer it's going into my 12 Ridgeline!

Still have my empeg installed in the original car I bought it for - a 1997 BMW M3. It's mated with a McIntosh MC4000M amplifier and Polk speakers all around.

Well, I got another M Coupe, so it only seems right to put the empeg back in. Currently hacking about with a 500GB SSD upgrade, with mixed luck.

500GB is more than pushing the RAM limits on the empeg. Oddly though, I expect it might work better if partitioned into a couple of more-or-less half size content partitions. Doing so would also require hand-tweaking the /dev/ entries to make the second partition appear to be on a second drive.

There have been several people using dual 250GB drives here in the past.

That's... interesting.

Just due to memory requirements for an fsck, or is there more to it?

[and as I posted in the other thread, the issue I'm having at the moment is with ethernet initializing]

The larger the block count of the filesystem, the more housekeeping RAM needed just to access it. One might expect 500GB to have about the same requirements as 2x250GB, so I'm not sure why I think it makes a difference.

Dunno about the ethernet.

How deeply would I have to mess with the /dev entries? Is symlinking partition entries enough? Actually... wouldn't just adjusting the mounts do it?

I'll play around with the ethernet a bit more, maybe see if I can add a retry.

Interestingly, my largest empeg does get upset if I try to do too much playlist tweaking - memory errors. It generally sorts itself out so I'm not panicking about it yet.

That's a lot of dBs (1000Watts RMS @4 Ohms, @12V) in an M3!

I also have an MC4000M, MX4000 Head Unit, Empeg with 2 each 250GB PATA drives, 58F Cap & 2 local batteries. I use Boston Pro Components all around Plus 2 Infinity 12s".

The Mac can really perform well but you have to provide a low impedance power source (see Middlebrook criteria) from DC to 50kHz.

Ross

I also had the Ethernet initializing issue with one of the PATA to SATA converters. The one with the Marvel chip of a certain revision didn't do it but had other issues.

I never got a good solution for SATA with large drives.

Ross

I have seen the "NOMEM Error" as well. As you said, it will generally catch up and solve itself. I have a huge .wav database though and it probably chokes on it once in a while.

Ross