I was shocked and greatly saddened by the news of the Empeg's EOL. I have a Mark 1 blue unit installed in my ML320 truck and its both my favorite tech toy and the thing I show off when people express interest in my truck. In fact, I just (today) purchased a Mark 2 unit from the US Rio store to put into the "shed" just in case (unless I am seduced to the dark side by its Ethernet port...)

Thank you to Hugo, Rob and everyone at the former Empeg Ltd.

A few questions please:

1. What is the expected lifetime of these units? (Both MK1 and MK2?) My assumption is that the buttons and the hard drives will go first. How long will there be ways to repair these? (I added a second, 18GB hard disk to my existing 6GB drive in my Mark 1, so I know how to swap the drives, and I have backups of my music, so the main concern is hardware repair -- soldering buttons, replacing displays, etc.)

2. Is there anything I should do to the Mark II I just ordered to make sure it is OK before I put it in the shed? (I'd hate to find it doesn't work a few years from now, when my Mark 1 wears out.)

3. Barring an accident or a voltage spike frying the components -- is there anything I can do to the Mark 1 to make it last longer now? Presumably this would apply to the Mark II as well.

One more observation -- you'll never know in advance if Rio decides to pull the plug on software development. I'd like to put in my request that a way to downgrade the software from the latest version always exists -- in the case that a last build comes out with major bugs and there isn't a chance to release a fix before the walls come tumbling down, we'll have a way of recovering to a stable build.

I'll continue to read the BBS (I'm mostly a lurker though) and will look forward to improvements and suggestions of new products. I wish all the Empeg people luck
in the future. -Gary