Docking station

First of all i hope everyone here had a great christmas, and many thanks to the empeg team for the great support and new software!

Now my question. Ive just ordered my second player (who could resist) which i plan to use at home docked in my Hi-Fi. Now im going to make a docking station for it and was wondering if anyone else had done this and had any tips? I think it should be fairly straighforward now that ill have a complete new empeg with docking cage. Ive found brian's website with pics of his docking station at http://www.hulkster.net/empeg/pics.php3, and the one on the riocar.org gallery but thought others might have tried this aswell? Also i was going to make it out of MDF, but thought it would be nice to use a proper hi-fi seperates box. Does anyone know where i could get basically an empty black box much like a seperates unit?

Any ideas much appreciated!

Thanks + hope everyone gets horendously drunk and makes a complete arse of themselves at new year! Ill try my best :)

Andy!

You mean something like this

I'm looking for "the right box" for my 2nd unit also. Still haven't found something I _really_ like but take a look at this the type "D" case in size 17" x 10" x 3" or 4" should be sufficient. To bad they don't have these in black

Yea that could do it. You could always spray it black. I think ill end up making one out of MDF and spraying it. Not sure how well itll come out tho. Might try and find a plain black piece of plastic to attach to the front of the unit, so at least thatll have a hi-fi type finish.

Yea that looks good. I was also thinking of removing the plastic facia and handle, and flush mounting it behind a sheet of clear perspex with cutouts for the buttons. Then spraying all the perspex black except where the screen was. Decided against this as i probably will still want to be able to slide the unit out to swap between my 2 empegs.

Just did this in photoshop which i might try and do (using the perspex front idea). Sorry it looks so bad and the perspectives completely wrong but you get the idea. Any more suggestions or problems you can see before i start? im not very good at making this sorta stuff so ill probably end up a complete mess :)

Question if you went down the empeg in a big box route what stops you from fitting a 3.5inch drive?

not much i guess. I suppose you'd need a computer PSU to power them, and some 2.5>3.5 ribbon convertors. Hmmm tempting :)

In that case you could also hookup a CD/DVD rom drive on the 2nd channel

If you look through some of the information at www.pjrc.com you can see someone there got a case from a company in Germany (good for Europeans) - they have a distributor in the UK as well. I know where I can buy some rack-mount-like stereo cases locally (near Toronto, Canada), but I'm not sure of the prices.

This might be something I'd like to try with a spare unit as well (since I'll have an extra sled now).

Bruno