The most important difference here is the origin of the epmeg. Originally created by a single board computer enthusiast with a love of music and marketed to a technologically savvy customer, it's feature set may never be duplicated. It was a successful failure as a commercial product from my perspective. I've been using the same empeg head unit on a daily commute (round trip of 50+ miles) for over 11 years. That's over 150k miles of use...

I didn't have to replace the original HDD until the 9 year mark. Also, never seen another spectrograph with the freqeuency axis displayed in log (like your hearing). It's a beautiful thing.

This is what happens when enthusiastic engineers who actually understand the customer (because they *are* the customer) are able to produce a quality product without being whipped by the pointy haired boss throughout the development cycle...