Quote:
I was just thinking that I'd like to purchase a unit, but not one that has been out and abused for 4 years.


I don't think it's quite the concern you make it out to be. First off, my biggest concern with the empeg was the HD. What happens in case it dies? Well, now that I've been an empeg owner for a few months now, my reading on the unit has shown me that the HD dying is almost a non-issue. If it dies, you just load the disk-tools flash image onto the player, it fdisks and formats the drive, you flash back the OS of choice (2.0 final or 3a8) and start rocking again.

Looking at the rest of the hardware, vibration is basically a non-issue with SMD components. If stuff in the empeg were going to "shake loose", odds are your car would quit working long before the empeg would - the ECM, which is usually located in the engine compartment, would be not-as-well-insulated against shock as the empeg is in the dashboard.

Line-level output is very easy on audio components. Since the empeg doesn't have an onboard amplifier, the odds of it losing it's ability to play audio within its useful lifetime are nearly nill. Someone with experience with the empeg design could chime in, but I believe that component-wise, the empeg would be fine if it played music 24x7x365 from the day it rolled off the assembly line.