http://cgi.ebay.com/ebaymotors/80-Gig-Ri...sspagenameZWD1V

WTF?

- Jon

I assume you're referring to the Buy-It-Now price? I was going to point out that unless someone wanted to spend that much, it's still just an auction, but it's not, is it?

Perhaps the seller is doing this so they can tell their significant other "I tried to sell it, but no one bought it... guess I'll just have to keep it.".

Yea, I saw that and thought. Man, this guy can't get oevr the fact he paid a lot for his electronic device years ago and its no longer worth what he paid.

He probably also has a DAT recorder on ebay for $2k or maybe a Sony Beta-max

I like the part where he says:

I originally paid $2500.00 for this unit when it came out without the upgrades.

I don't think anybody paid quite that much...

tanstaafl.

If there is no "bid window" then the Buy It Now price IS the price.

There are auctions that have a "buy it now" price as well as a bid window, but the Buy It Now price will go away once a bid it placed on it. In this case, it looks like the guy wants the buy it now price or nothing...Good Luck, dude!

Perhaps he was the unimformed buyer & is now trying to recoup his loss.

I paid $1000 for mine in 2003 which was then also considered rare because production had stopped but as most things go out of production it gets valuable in time..
There is much superior products out there today ,,,even devices to hook your ipod to stock stereos but still , EMpeg will always carry it's value as it becomes rarer....so he is taking advantage of that

I saw this and actually took it upon myself to try and help this guy sell his empeg and he didn't like the truth.

Me: "i hope you realize that this player at MOST is worth 400-450. no one is going to pay $1500 unless they are misinformed. just thought i would let you know incase you had high hopes on selling the empeg for that much. just an f.y.i."

Him/Her: "Youre entitled to your opinion. I paid like 2500.00 for it new from Rio and upgraded the hard drive so maybe youre misinformed. Dont email me anymore with this crap."

I wasn't trying to be mean but i thought it was a little funny that this guy actually thinks it will sell high because he has 80gb of storage.

Ah, if you encode an MP3 high enough, it could be higher "bitrate" than a CD. Didn't someone say you could encode 640+ kbps?

Actually .WAV files on the Empeg are 1411 kbps. They just take up a lot of space (20 to 77 MB per song, 40 MB on average).

Ross

Of course, encoding to (lossy) mp3 at a bitrate above the source (CD 44.1k) is not very useful is it. I wonder how lossy it is at the sources bitrate; it encodes it in quite a different way, so there must be some losses, wonder how close it is - anyone?

44.1kHz is the sample rate, not the bitrate. The bitrate, as Drakino just posted, is 1411.2kbps. But bitrate isn't an accurate descriptor of lossiness. Just look at all the studies done comparing reproduction quality between different codecs at the same bitrate, or even the comparisons for different mp3 encoders at the same bitrate.

The mp3 specification does not allow bitrates that even come close to the bitrate of a CD, much less over it. Even if it did, it wouldn't be called compression any more, and few people are looking to get the same data encoded in a bigger data set. If you wanted that, you'd just use the lossless WAV.

While CD-style PCM encoding is obviously losing data from the sound made in the air, that's not really the definition of "lossy" we're talking about. The notion of "lossy" is only relevant where "losslessness" is possible. Analog sounds, from vinyl to tape to the original sound coming out of someone's mouth, are impossible to reproduce losslessly, as there is no sample rate that matches the sample rate of the universe. People might argue that analog does a better job reproducing analog sounds than digital due to the fact that analog doesn't sample, but analog recordings almost always have a much higher noise floor. Of course, it may be that master recordings are made at a different sample rate. 48kHz is also a common sample rate, used often in DVD audio, for example. If the master was 48kHz, you might be able to measure the lossiness involved in transcoding to 44.1kHz, but that's some math I'm not interested in doing.

Update:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ebaymotors/80-Gig-Ri...sspagenameZWD1V

Now down to $1,000. Still ridiculous, just a bit less ridiculous.

- Jon

Guy quoted the FAQ in his listing, too. He knows what it's worth, he's just hoping for a sucker to sell it to.