Drakino's post about #359 reminded me that I hadn't updated my review with a long-term report, something I'd promised myself I'd do. So here we go:

I've had the unit for nearly two months now. It's been great the whole time. I haven't had any mechanical or electronic problems with the unit in that entire time. And it runs all day: In the car when I drive to work, all day on my desk at work, in the car on the way home, then in the evening after I get home. I haven't listened to this much music in years.

I have taken care of the noise problems by simply tuning my amps' input gains correctly. Now "0db" is the maximum volume I want on the Empeg, and the overall noise floor is quite low (better now, in fact than the CD player that the Empeg replaced).

The software improvements to the unit have been great. I spent a lot of time on this BBS championing the equalizer, and have been rewarded with seeing Empeg implement the coolest and most powerful EQ I've ever seen in a consumer product. The only thing left on my "must-have" wish list is the ability to associate a particular EQ preset with a given song. That would allow me to fix the EQ on a few albums which are to bassy or too bright, or to normalize songs that are too quiet.

Empeg's tech support and customer service have been fantastic the whole time. All of my questions are answered promptly, bug reports are followed-up, and new software releases are frequent. I've been allowed to test pre-release software builds, and I've seen some of my specific suggestions implemented.

I recently added a subwoofer and I am now completely thrilled with the overall sound of the car stereo. The woofer allowed me to tune my amps and the EQ properly (instead of trying to over-boost the bass on my rear deck speakers), so that the quality of the Empeg's output shines through much better than it ever did.

In fact, the audio output quality of the Empeg is so good, that it's allowed me to hear certain compression artifacts on some of my MP3s that I hadn't noticed before. The ones that I'm noticing were done with an older encoder and without normalization. I might re-encode them with a new encoder when I get a bigger hard disk for the Empeg.

Which is, by the way, the only real problem I'm having now: I love the unit so much, and I listen to it so much, that the 4-gig drive is just not enough. I was getting by with just putting "most" of my music on it. Now I want all of my music on it, even the stuff I don't like very much. Fortunately, a new hard disk is supposed to be easy to install and configure, so once I've saved my pennies, it's a no-brainer.

The visualizations are something that I'm surprised at... I figured I'd be bored of them by now. I'm not. I like having them up while I drive. I don't stare at them while driving, they just kind of sit there in my peripheral vision. My daughter likes to cycle through them with the remote while she rides. My wife makes me turn them off if we drive at night, because the display is so bright.

Transporting the unit is a lot easier for me now that I bought a Case Logic PDC-1 bag. I'm looking forward to seeing the Empeg cases when they come out- perhaps I'll buy one of those, too.

Overall, I still love the unit. It gets five out of five stars for long-term enjoyment.


-- Tony Fabris -- Empeg #144 --
Caution: Do not look into laser with remaining good eye.