http://www.mp3newswire.net/stories/2004/irivercar.html

At last someone can see an opportunity here. What a surprise it isn't Rio!

Rob

Don't get me started... I know... I know...

I was surprised to see Alan Cox, of all people, saying:

"True but you can buy mini-itx PC cases in card stereo form factor now and roll your own with added support for video, gps"

in response to a "my empeg is great" comment

I'm all behind them. When Diamond bought Empeg they picked up that whole market sector on a plate -- the car-player was literally years ahead of anything else. (Even now, v2 has features that nothing else on the market has.) Since then, the successive owners of the car-player copyrights have utterly dropped the ball. year-in, year-out, displaying blistering incompetence and vertiginous indifference in equal proportions. I don't think Rio deserve to succeed in the car audio market after that. (Judging from their flash and portable players, the Iriver won't be gapless and its UI will suck. But there'll be lots of hardware features and it'll be better than nothing.)

Frankly, I'm good and cross. Within arm's reach of where I'm sitting now are technologies and code that could have kept Rio on top of the car audio market all this time, and put them all over the map into the home audio market (Roku schmoku). But nothing ever happens.

Peter

It really is embarrassing that they haven't taken advantage of the opportunity. What do the higher-ups at Rio say about this when it's brought up? It MUST be brought up, right? Is it possible now that iRiver is moving forward that they might change their minds and look at a car version, or is it just not going to happen?

It'd be odd for them to continue to write off the market in the face of their next nearest competitor adopting it, unless they know something we don't.

it's too bad, I've had discussions with several people about why we as an empeg community can't step in and build 1000 units of a new model player, license the software from rio, and fix the problem ourselvs.

They also mention rebranding the product and offering to another company. In that case, they don't need to break into the market as much... they could sell it to someone with presence like Clarion or Delphi.

Maybe if iRiver does produce it and it does really well Rio may come back and deciede to try a Empeg 3. *hoping*

if anyone wanted to sell their spare, now's a good time to do it. there's usually a surge for empeg sales every mention on slashdot. be even better if someone posted a link to the BBS in reply to alan cox. =)

Quote:
be even better if someone posted a link to the BBS in reply to alan cox.

If it'll bring the Slashdot crowd, please don't.

Is DIN really dead? Seems like tons of aftermarket audio companies are doing quite well. In fact, cars marketed toward younger buyers feature popular aftermarket headunits as a selling point. The empeg has shown that the hardware is really secondary. We are running very similar software on our empegs as the Karma owners are on their portables. I don't know of any aftermarket audio manufacturers that are making non-DIN units, so if a company were to get started in the aftermarket audio business, it'd make sense to do DIN units. Otherwise, they would be trying to break into two markets at one (mp3 car audio and non-DIN car audio.)

Don't get me wrong, I see the advantages of a portable/dash integration method, but I don't think that DIN is as dead as we might think. It might at least get them into the market and they could take their software with them to wherever the market goes.

Yeah but people buying Scions wouldn't be the target market for 1000.00 dollar car decks.

I would rather see a seperate box with the majority of the parts in it and a remote display / control unit.

Actually, younger people are more likely to dish out gobs of money on this stuff and be computer savy enough to do it! Once we get houses, a spouse and kids, it's harder to justify this kinda stuff. I'd be there are more "low end" cars that have $1000 car stereos than cars over $30,000. Though I admit, I'm just guessing on this.

This might just be foot up the arse that rio needs to look into making a car player i wonder if the top bods even know what the empeg is might be worth rummagging around and sending them one as a "prototype"

I notice there are no pictures anywhere. Sounds a little like vaporware to me. You'd think there be some sort of prototype photo/CGI

Perhaps they have a very, very early prototype and are testing the water? Doesn't sound like they'll be coming out in the short term at least.

> Why?

1. So we could have USB 2.0 master capabilities. This would allow all manner of things to be connected. As I understand it, it is problematic to connect a seperate board with the necessary components to the main board, but much easier if there was a daughter card containing the components and the processor - whereby the daughter card would plug into a socket where the processor used to be.

2. So we could do complex software defined radio or even software defined TV stuff.

3. So we could have even more fancy visuals such as more complicated rendering, millions of colours and higher screen resolutions. This might be done on the StrongArm, in the generic DSP or a mixture of both. Kinda irrelevant right now, but if we did get some kind of remote colour screen working...

Designing, making and installing this daughterboard will be a huge amount of work.

You'll probably want to use a XScale as a CPU, you'll need RAM on the daughterboard as well since the existing RAM isn't going to be fast enough, the USB 2.0 controller will require another chip which can attach to the PCI bus and as you're doing all the other upgrades then you might as well put in a 10/100 ethernet PHY. Oh and don't forget that since you're upgrading the display as well then you'll need to put a connector on the daughterboard for that.

All that's really left on the main board that you'll still use is the Phillips DSP, Crystal ADC and HDD connector. You might as well start from scratch if you're going to be doing all this since the daughterboard will contain nearly everything by itself.

See, I'm thinking beyond hacking the empeg. Instead, creating a new product to suit consumers' uptake of HDD-based portables. There's no financial feasibility in making a hardware hack for a product that there are only 5,000 of. Why not create something new with a goal to produce 5,000 a month. Full-on product development, manufacturing, marketing, etc.

Maybe I shouldn't have called it "MKIII" because that implies an empeg revision. Rather, give it a new name, because it's a new product to fit a new demand.

How about a revision to my original suggestion. Make the master control box small enough to mount under one of the front seats. Boxes in the trunk are stupid. Then the remote display could have one clean wire to carry power and maybe the data from the controler, if not using bluetooth. Create three individual adapters for portables to wirelessly communicate; Rio, iPod, Nomad. Though I guess we'd have to license the technology to communicate over their interface ports.

But the remote display is the trick. Sure, make it 2DIN size with four buttons and a knob, full color, good viewing angle, etc. Car manufacturers could choose to integrate that into their dash and into their car's computer. Fine, have our control box interface with theirs. And if not, the customer could put the screen wherever they want. Air vents, cup holder, who knows.

And the control box would be the hard worker. Maybe have storage just for buffering, but the portable does the main storage. The control box would need the code to work with three different devices presenting one common interface to the user. Use it to emulate as many cool empeg features as the portables will allow, all with ellegant empeg interface. Imagine the flexibility. You're driving around with your Karma, but your girlfriend wants to hear a tune on her iPod. Fine, plug in her iPod and use the same interface to access her music.

I'm dreaming again, I know, but there must be a real demand for this. Portable music/storage will saturate the market, so it's only logical to extend the user experience to the car by leveraging their portable. Now, if only I could get together about 20 guys and a million dollars to start........

The problem is that people never having experienced a good dedicated car player are happy using their portables. So now instead of why buy that I can make on with an old 486 and some chewing gum you'll get why buy that I already have an ipod.

Also just making it interface to a portable you would be limited in the HDD size area.

yea.. i got tired of all the people saying "you could do FOO hack job" without any real idea on what it takes to do such a thing.