See, I'm thinking beyond hacking the empeg. Instead, creating a new product to suit consumers' uptake of HDD-based portables. There's no financial feasibility in making a hardware hack for a product that there are only 5,000 of. Why not create something new with a goal to produce 5,000 a month. Full-on product development, manufacturing, marketing, etc.

Maybe I shouldn't have called it "MKIII" because that implies an empeg revision. Rather, give it a new name, because it's a new product to fit a new demand.

How about a revision to my original suggestion. Make the master control box small enough to mount under one of the front seats. Boxes in the trunk are stupid. Then the remote display could have one clean wire to carry power and maybe the data from the controler, if not using bluetooth. Create three individual adapters for portables to wirelessly communicate; Rio, iPod, Nomad. Though I guess we'd have to license the technology to communicate over their interface ports.

But the remote display is the trick. Sure, make it 2DIN size with four buttons and a knob, full color, good viewing angle, etc. Car manufacturers could choose to integrate that into their dash and into their car's computer. Fine, have our control box interface with theirs. And if not, the customer could put the screen wherever they want. Air vents, cup holder, who knows.

And the control box would be the hard worker. Maybe have storage just for buffering, but the portable does the main storage. The control box would need the code to work with three different devices presenting one common interface to the user. Use it to emulate as many cool empeg features as the portables will allow, all with ellegant empeg interface. Imagine the flexibility. You're driving around with your Karma, but your girlfriend wants to hear a tune on her iPod. Fine, plug in her iPod and use the same interface to access her music.

I'm dreaming again, I know, but there must be a real demand for this. Portable music/storage will saturate the market, so it's only logical to extend the user experience to the car by leveraging their portable. Now, if only I could get together about 20 guys and a million dollars to start........