Wow, this has been a pretty crazy thread. Although I am also pretty new to this board, let me note a few things.

I am a programmer, and I can honesly tell you hardware is more "free" at my company than programming. We generally just pass hardware along at cost so we get paid for our programming.

This really is a player with features you'll never be able to find anywhere else: Other car stereo manufacturers will never include half (not even half really) of the features we get. I don't know that you can even buy an equalizer like the one on this unit.

I am sure that the Empeg team could not have kept the unit from being EOL'd, but I do wonder why SB never advertised that I saw (I never saw the unit in Crutchfield). I don't know if more advertising $ could have kept the line producing, but I can't tell you how many broken hearts I have seen after I showed friends my unit and then told them it was discontinued. I told them they could still get them on E-bay, but most of them needed time to save up money. I'm just glad I got mine when I did.

I can also say I have paid the record companies every penny for all of the music on my empeg. While I think this may not universally be the case, I am absolutely positive that the record industry has made more money because of the empeg because we are all buying and listening to more music.