I still remember the time frame I was in when I stumbled upon empeg.com. I was in my latter college years, and as such - I had amassed a massive mp3 collection. But, I was also poor. All I know is that I wanted mp3s in my car, and at that point, I was burning mp3 mixes to CD on a slow old 4x writer, and even then, that was another cd I would have to carry around.

I began searching around, I think mostly looking at the hardware page on mp3.com. So many people had rigged up these hodge-podge systems out of cheap old pizza-box PCs mounted in the trunk, with some obscure and convoluded control panel in the console. I still remember when the z919 came out, but, like others, I looked away from all of this when I found the empeg site. This was even before the MkII came out. All I knew was that I needed about $1500 bucks. It would be the first thing I would buy when I graduated and got a job.

And it was, just shy of 2 years later - I was dropping 1300 clams for the 10gb model. It is still to this day (with the exception of cars) the single most expensive thing I have ever bought, and worth every penny