Well, after playing with my new empeg for the better part of the day, I have to say wow!

I thought I managed to crash emplode once, but that was just because I added a directory to it with about 10 CDs worth of music, and it was just taking a while to figure out what I did to it.

Adding music is a breeze, and I now have to come up with a better method for organization. I've been reading the posts about how people plan on organizing their music, but I've put it off until I had a chance to actually navigate the music myself.

The one thing I miss from my Alpine is a mute button. It used to drop 10 "levels" off the volume. i.e. if I had the volume at 25, it dropped to 15. I don't remember if this was in db or not, but I doubt it. I know that I can pause playback, but that's not what I'm looking for. When I pull up to a toll booth, the attendant probably doesn't want to hear More Human Than Human at 0db, but I don't want to pause it just to pay the toll. This is a minor thing, and if my last stereo didn't have it, I probably wouldn't even think of it.

I went straight for ethernet when I hooked it up, and since I've got DHCP running at work, it worked magically. No problems finding the empeg at all. Now I just have to get ipchains running on my empeg, because as soon as I had it turned on, the guys in my office were running port scans on it, and trying to telnet/ftp into it.

As for the wow factor, what can I say? To quote John Gaeta (visual effects director for The Matrix,) "The empeg kicks holy a**!" OK, so I'm paraphrasing a bit here, but you get the idea. Two of the guys in my office are now seriously thinking about getting empegs, and two more said something like "Wow, that's COOL!" Keep in mind I've only showed it to four people there so far. Not bad percentage wise. Even my wife liked it, although she only likes the starfield visualization...

OK, this post has gotten long enough, I guess I ought to get to bed now.


-Trevor

Mark 2, Green 12GB #080000349