Greetings!

Something you may want to consider: most of the people on this board are somewhat fanatic about their empegs, and are willing to demo them. Once you see an empeg in action, I think that will answer all questions you may have as to which brand to buy. Where are you located?

As to searching, there is nothing like designing your user interface to whatever playlist structure you want (however simple or complex, and that can be tailored to your driving / listening habits), and to have a search capability that will find anything by artist / title / album / year / genre or any of the other ID3 tags. This is great for larger capacity drives with lots of data. Also, you have the ability to "tweak" your playlists on the fly, so if you are in a random play mode and want to hear more of an artist or album, you hit a single button on the remote for more of the same album or artist.

Other "bonus" features are the third party software, developed by many people on this board. How about remote controlling your empeg over ethernet via a java applet, or having automatic volume adjustment to give you a more stable sound level over multiple ripped CDs?

Does anyone remember where that video demo is? I know it was for the Mark 1, but it gets some of the point across...

Paul G.
SN# 090000587 (96GB Smoke)