I've had my digital audio center for a couple weeks now and decided I should post a little review. First off, I didn't read 95% of the manual that came with the unit so if my comments have something that is covered in the manual, please let me know (yes it is my ignorance but I don't read manuals - if the unit cannot be operated without a manual, then it's not a very good consumer product).

I LOVE THIS THING! Yes it has its quirks but overall it is the best solution for MP3 management that I have ever used. I have tired numerous solutions including PC's (little micro ones, laptops, destop servers, you name it) and another all-in-one MP3 box (ZapStation - piece of sh*t). Nothing has come close to the convienence of the HSX.

Here are my requirements:
- Noise level must be virtually silent (meaning the fan in the box) - The HSX is excellent in this category. I only here it making sounds when it spins up a disc and is copying music. The fan is nearly silent but rarely on so it's mot a problem.

- Unit has to be easy enough for my wife to use. Forget computers, she even called me once to say her brand new Apple iBook was broken. Turns out she didn't know you ever had to hit the power button. She was used to just opening up the screen while the iBook was in sleep mode. The HSX is so simple to use a monkey could do it.

- Speed of ripping CD's - I have close to 500 CD's and if I'm going to re-rip them all into one place there has to be a quick and easy way of doing it. Again the HSX kicks butt in this area. Put it on multi CD mode and just start feeding. It takes about 3-4 minutes for the HSX to copy the CD to the drive and then does the encoding in the background. I did run into a problem were after continuely feeding the HSX about 90 CD's it said there was no more room on the drive (actually it was way behind on encoding so there was a bunch of huge files still on the drive). Solution was to go to bed and start again the next day. It took me 3 days to get about 300 CD's encoded.

- Ability to play new CD's without having to RIP them - no problem with the HSX

- Ability to stream music to other rooms in the house - no problem with the HSX

- Ability to create custom CD's - No problem with the HSX

- Good audio sound - The sound from the HSX is wonderful!

- Need to sync with my Empeg - This doesn't work yet but they claim it's coming.

OK so what doesn't I like about HSX
- Needs bigger HD - I know 40 gig is big enough for MOST consumers but this isn't a NORMAL consumer product at $1500. HD space is so damn cheap I don't understand why they didn't throw an 80gig drive in there (or 2 for than matter).
- OS stability. The unit reboots often. Almost everytime I play around with the HSX it ends up rebooting. Only takes about 15 seconds but very annoying. Never happens while it's just playing music. Imagine your Empeg rebooting all the time while selecting a visual or switching from player to radio.

- CD-R speed - ouch! This thing is so slow I could write at least 3 CD's on my PC during the same time. I'm guessing the CD-R they put in it is a slow piece of crap.

- Lack of built in Ethernet. Who the hell uses HPNA? And why should I have to buy an extra USB to Ethernet adapter? Come on SonicBlue this is a $1500 pro-consumer product.

- Built in CDDB database - This thing is awesome as it recognized every single CD I had. Problem is there is many errors in it (spelling mistakes (does Alanis Morissette have 1 S or 2?), bad choice of genre selection (Five for Fighting is NOT heavy metal), many mistakes in year of song - I now have 568 tracks listed as year 000 and 111 tracks as year 199).

- Visuals sort of suck.

- Need to implement a GIANT text interface that allows you to operate the unit with the remote from across your living room. Right now you have to be within 5 feet unless you have eyes of an eagle.

- No way to tell how much space you have left on the drive.

- Please hurry up with the Empeg syncing.

OK, that's it for now.
Rob

Cool review. I agree with you about pretty much everything in the review. A few notes:

- Free disk space is reported in the "About" menu.

- The thing should not crash or reboot like you describe. It's not meant to do that. That's a bug, and should be reported. We thought we nailed all of those bugs during testing. If you can consistently reproduce a particular sequence of events to cause a crash, please put that in the bug reports forum here.

- Disk drive size: It should be pretty easy to put in your own drive. We don't have instructions for how to copy from an old drive to a new drive, but eventually we'll get around to that. Also: Remember that you can delete all of the low-bitrate "portable player" content to free up some space if you don't ever use a portable player. You can also disable the portable-content-encoding feature if you like.

- Lack of ethernet: They lobbied for built-in ethernet and were shot down by the Powers That Be. For what it's worth, I agree that it should have had built-in ethernet. At least they did a lot of work to make sure the USB-ethernet adapters were stable and worked. I was definintely a part of that process, so I know how much trouble it was to get them working.

- CDDB typos: Agreed, the CDDB sucks, but it's better than nothing in most cases. And with the Emplode 2.x feature set, it's reasonably easy to fix that stuff up if you really have to. It is also possible to fix tags from the remote control, but more tedious. By the way, did you know you can hook up a USB keyboard to the thing and edit your tags that way?

Thanks for the review Rob - I've copied it to the project engineering and marketing teams at SONICblue.

Rob

I have also noticed this thing occasionally rebooting when you have it in multi CD mode. It'll reboot quickly and continue to play what it was playing but you have to set it up again to record in multi cd mode. A little annoying but something I can live with. Especially since I am done ripping.

Jerz