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what would be comparable that's out there now that does the above wishlist?

Nothing. Not your entire wishlist. Only the empeg/Rio Car does everything you listed.

Now, to take your points one at a time so you know what you'd be giving up:

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Of highest importance to me is the hard drive capacity and quality of sound

You'll be fine there with a lot of the alternatives, because you can usually hack in a bigger hard drive. But then again, I don't know of anything else that lets you painlessly add a second blank hard drive and have it just start using the blank space...

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Second is the display

If you mean the VFD, as opposed to LCD or EL, plenty of people complain about the empeg's display getting washed out in bright sun, so you might actually prefer a different product in that department.

If you mean Toby's fantastic visuals, then nothing else comes close. Other car stereos have looping animations, but nothing as amazing as what Toby's done.

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navigation,

The ability to create freeform playlist trees, to search alphanumerically by tite/artist/album/year, has not been matched by any other player.

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the "coolness" of having linux running in the car,

Not gonna find it in any other product.

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the ethernet for fast xfer,

Nothing else has ethernet. But some products use USB2 or firewire, which is even faster than the empeg's 10mbps ethernet.

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a pull out design,

Like that did you any good.

Sorry, didn't mean to rub salt on an open wound. I am sorry for your loss. But please PLEASE people: Pull out your empegs! Don't let this happen to you!

Anyway, you're not going to find that in anything but the empeg. It was a pullout design LONG after every other company stopped making pullouts because people didn't want to carry them.

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and a kick-ass remote that lets me do really cool stuff like "ignore this artist for this playlist" or "hey, play me some more of that album I'm on right now".

Nope. It's little features like this that keep us saying "the empeg is still the best" even after all these years. No one else has done cool stuff like this. The iPod doesn't do this. Heck, even Rio's own new portables don't have all these features.

There's a whole host of features you get with the empeg that you're not listing. Things like a hackable open-source kernel, all the features in Hijack, the 20-band parametric EQ, the multi-OS support of Jemplode, the agressive disk caching that allows instant song switching, gapless playback, third party apps like emphatic and gpsapp...

Wait a minute. You owned an empeg, you should know all this already. Was this post a deliberate troll?
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Tony Fabris