I have just spent 8 or so hours putting the latest and not so greatest CiC system into my BMW, admittedly without the BMW apps feature.

Whilst it's a massive step up in quality and performance over the unit that was in there to start with, STILL it's no where near as good at playing music as the empeg.

How is that even possible ??? Why are car audio people so bad at making this stuff ??? It's been 10 years !!!

If I could shoe horn the empeg in I would! there is an AUX just sat there behind the head unit, but the new one is double din so there is no chance of it actually happening

Cheers

Cris

Yup, even the latest touch screen VAG stuff that I have is extremely shoddy. Nothing more than an MP3 playing file browser really. Even the random mode isn't really random and you end up hearing the same 10 tracks over and over. Not to mention the clumsy navigation that is pretty impossible to use while driving.

Sure, Bluetooth Audio works well if I wanted to use my phone for music. Is this where the future is going?

I dunno. I have briefly used a Mercedes system which didn't appear too bad on the first glance, same with some of the Audi stuff. Maybe they are getting the hang of it slowly?

They put the sub par stuff out there because people will buy it. It's also a question of money. The more features they add equates to more potential customer service calls from people who don't understand how to use something. They then have to hire more people to solve the problems that kills the bottom line.

They will never give us more unless they have to.

The most important difference here is the origin of the epmeg. Originally created by a single board computer enthusiast with a love of music and marketed to a technologically savvy customer, it's feature set may never be duplicated. It was a successful failure as a commercial product from my perspective. I've been using the same empeg head unit on a daily commute (round trip of 50+ miles) for over 11 years. That's over 150k miles of use...

I didn't have to replace the original HDD until the 9 year mark. Also, never seen another spectrograph with the freqeuency axis displayed in log (like your hearing). It's a beautiful thing.

This is what happens when enthusiastic engineers who actually understand the customer (because they *are* the customer) are able to produce a quality product without being whipped by the pointy haired boss throughout the development cycle...

Couldn't agree with you more!

Ross

What amazed me during my CarPC attempts was how bad stuff was there too. It seemed more "hey look, I have a full computer in the car with all these programs" instead of "look at how all this computing power makes music playback awesome". When I ordered my empeg back in 99, I had no idea how unique it really would turn out to be. Possible serious contenders were arriving on the scene, but never really materialized.

empeg is still the best all these years later. its amazing.

So, I just got a new car (it should arrive in December). I am seriously thinking to install the Empeg back into it, possibly in the glove compartment, or somewhere else, and try to somehow feed into the existing Bose system. This is how much I miss it.

In my old car, which I gave back to the dealer, I left my Alpine x100 that I had installed two yrs ago. This is how much I did not care about that head unit. It did sound well. But it was so limited and frustrating, compared to the Empeg.

My new Impreza lacks a suitable space for the full empeg. So for now, I'm using it with a 12VDC lighter cable and an RCA-to-miniplug for the audio. Works perfectly well, and can be passed around the vehicle among the occupants.

Longer term, I do have an assembled/working display extender kit, and there is a good place in the lower dash for the display to fit.

Cheers

Yes, I haven't followed the display extender thread for a while, but I was considering that too.

Mazda CX-5 (my new car) has nice double DIN slot, but the factory infotainment system is there and I don't want to remove it: car can be configured from there (which is really nice) and I don't want to lose access to those settings.

But it fortunately come with some space below the AC controls, right behind the gear shift lever, so I am considering some custom made dock. My installers and friends are quite good at that. We'll see. For the first time, installing my empeg is not priority nr. 1 after getting a new car. Which in so many ways it is not good news.