man everyone is bothering me to buy my spare. I want to be able to build these for $300 and sell for $550 or so. You think I can do it. Basically I wouldnt include the HD and I would also change the VFD to some kinda of color matrix. Please give me your input. I havent thought of licensing yet! Honestly I havent thought this out past 15 min

I would be suprised if you could get all of the parts for under $300 in low quantity. If you were manufacuring in the dozen(s) just the fascia, metalwork, screws and misc. hardware would probably blow almost all of your budget.

It would be cool to revive the empeg or a similar device, and I hope someone proves me wrong, but I would be amazed if you could get half the key parts for under $300 at low quantity.

im thinking lots of 1000

Were you planning on having people pre-pay?

Even at $300 cost the lot would run you $300000 which is more spare change then I have in the couch

It's an interesting thought. Were you thinking of attempting to lisence rights to make an empeg replica or redesigning from the ground up?

I suspect you would have some difficulty getting redistribution rights as sonicblue was using the IP it created making the empeg in future products.

something similar to hugo's original mp3 mobile would probably be cheaper to make with the majority of it in a box and a seperate display / control unit.

Wanna sell me your spare?...

Just kidding....

Part of the beauty of the empeg hardware is how well it's thought out and designed with high quality components compleety aimed at being a car stereo. But, the best part of the empeg is not the hardware as much as the player software that makes everything work.

Putting a computer in your trunk is possible, and even getting a display board and four buttons and a knob is possible but sonic blue isn't goign to sell you the source code to the player as it still has plenty of life left in it. Reimplementing the player software is an interesting idea, and no one has come close to doing it either closed or open source.

Matthew

There's no way you could make the empeg for $300, even in lots of 1000 without a hard disk - sorry, we've been there & we're not stupid.

The VF display cost us around $35 without support circuitry when buying 1000 pieces at a time (and considerably more than that for smaller support quantities!). We did find a colour LCD suitable for automotive, but this was $100 in quantities of 1000, excluding backlight drive circuitry and it wasn't even active matrix.

The cableset cost $50 alone, although this could have been reduced by going to the far east for production and substituting some cheaper connectors. The metalwork was around $50 too, but again if you were making several thousand you'd get punches made and this would drop hugely - ours were mostly CNC punched.

If you said "I want to bring back the empeg with a colour display and want to sell it for $1000 without a hard disk", that might be a more realistic proposition, but remember the software is the biggest investment - more than the complete hardware run costs.

Making hardware is expensive. Making solid, well-made hardware in small runs (and here "small run" is anything less than 10,000 units in one go) is almost prohibitively expensive. Often, when the manufacturer calls you for the 10th time that week because one of the 400 or so components has gone on long lead time and wants you to check out a possible substitute from another manufacturer, you wonder if it's worth it...

Hugo

I for one am very glad you decided it was worth it - I've had stacks of fun with mine so far and they are a serious talking point with my (mainly techy) friends.

I'm just sorry SB decided not to market it properly. It was maybe a slow starter, and most of the old timers on the BBS were definitely early adopters, but the market is growing fast now.

Would be nice for SB to resurrect the rio, but I guess they don't need to now, with the rest of their product line.

Good points but I have one question. How is it possible to make a RioRiot or IPod for $300-$400? I am assuming they are functional players with decent software ( I assume the software is either flash firmware or something). I am also assuming the ipod and riot could put out a decent line out signal.

Was it just the Auto after market itself that doomed the empeg?

It's probably a combination of lower cost components and higher volume of production.

The Riot and iPod are made in large quantities - I suspect the manufacturing runs are at least 50,000 pieces for the iPod, for example. Volume makes things cheap - you can get agressive with the silicon suppliers, you'll have multiple factories dying to get your business to build the thing, etc.

Also, the iPod/Riot are much simpler internally than the empeg. They play music. No audio in chip, no ethernet chip, no serial port, no multichannel out with low impedance drives, no complex power supply, no temperature sensors, no supervisory PICs, a display that almost costs an order of magnitude less, etc etc etc. Yes, they have a battery and a charge management chip, but that's about the end of it.

The software on these devices is also a lot simpler; you notice it with things like the way the iPod locks the ui completely during HDD spinup, the lack of advanced playlist reordering when the player is running, etc. Still, they amortised the software development costs over a lot more units, which means that they can make less margin and still be profitable on the product.

The auto aftermarket, IMHO, would have been able to support the empeg as a low-volume product. We were working on figures for small distribution deals with specialist dealers (people like Cambridge Car Audio, who can be trusted not to screw up the installation, for example). As with any growing company though, cashflow was an issue - you can't build bigger batches from the money coming in from a smaller batch, you have to grow organically. We were hoping that Rio would make a bigger splash marketing-wise (ok, a splash at all) and would fund the (expensive) development of a more consumerised next-gen player (the mk3) which would have had wider appeal, moving it from just specialist aftermarket to high-end general aftermarket. This didn't happen for a number of reasons, the tech bust being one of them - automotive wasn't a core market, so it got cut when savings were being looked for.

Hugo

I get the feeling the empeg is what you would have built (and did) for yourself ... not the average Joe. Which is in itself the ultimate empeg irony.

Err, yes, it was our own personal dream machine

We did see the possibilities for a more consumerised unit though - less hackable, but it still brings most of the joys of empeg ownership to the wider public. Problem is, to start with a model that has general market appeal takes pots of money - to get the industrial design right, to get the price down, to get distribution, etc.

So we did what we could - we made a great product that we knew would only really sell to the people who understood the freedom it gave them enough to overlook the industrial design/pricing issues.

Hugo

maybe i'm wrong but isn't a lot of cost in the empeg going to buy the StrongARM CPU and motherboard? I mean cool as it is it seems like overkill to use a full-fledged CPU like that for what the Empeg does. Of course dropping the StrongARM CPU could mean dropping the visuals too I understand, but with all the good dedicated MP3 decoding chips available know it seems like the Empeg could be done cheaper... but it wouldn't be a StrongARM and it wouldn't run linux.

Then it would be called a NEO.

Could be.. but are the visuals really worth the extra cost the strongarm cpu adds? Could the visuals be done with a different cpu that was cheaper?

Besides this I think the Empeg's real trouble was in marketing.. they marketed to the wrong crowd by marketing to nerds. Most self-respecting techies back in those days couldn't face their friends if they bought a $1000 car stereo when they thereotically could have rolled their own car mp3 player for 1/3 the price. They should have marketed to car audio nerds who brag about how much they spend on their stereo (and maybe they tried and failed i dunno).

In reply to:

---

are the visuals really worth the extra cost the strongarm cpu adds? Could the visuals be done with a different cpu that was cheaper?

---

About all I'd expect to be cheaper would be the mass-market stuff, Celeron/Duron CPUs, and I wouldn't expect such CPUs you could get "cheaply" would be optimized for low power either.

Then again, I haven't looked.

I think the strongarm cpu was $50 each in small quantities. Several of the empeg folks have a strong background in ARM/Acorn. Maybe they thought by using a very powerful cpu, it could be used to do other things like crossfading, voice recognition, gps, encoding in the background (in the rio advanced audio center) etc besides just playing mp3s.

As far as marketing goes, SB made NO attempt at it. I did hear about it showing up on some tv show once but other than that, I never saw an ad or anything else along those lines. No one knew about it and thus no one could justify spending $1000 on one.

Has anyone seen the HSX-109 at retail yet? Any ads for it?

Maybe when the economy makes a turn for the better SB will reconsider entering the car audio market with a major OEM partner. :-)

Sean

welp you all have brought me to reality. I guess this is way over my head. Man if only someone like pioneer could buy this concept and sell it for 600 or so. Man I know I can get a credit card sized p3 chip and credit card motherboard for 1000 but that is over cost. I just love the empeg design. Come on bring back a limited production run.

As far as marketing goes, SB made NO attempt at it.

In fact Rio undertook some marketing. I'd say they spent far more money on marketing the car player than empeg ever did, but on the scale of things that's not saying much. This might have been more down to bad timing than anything - at the time empeg was acquired, Rio were running a brand name awareness campaign. They spent a LOT of money on TV, magazine and internet ads to promote the Rio name. No products whatsoever were featured, including the car player. The wisdom of that campaign is a matter of opinion, and hard to quantify - but I'm sure it didn't do much for Rio Car.

Has anyone seen the HSX-109 at retail yet?

It isn't released to retail yet, although I believe there may be something happening with some specific audio chains. I don't think that's the point of the HSX-109, though. It is a product which starts to link together our related products - a direction which I think is the heart of SB's future.

Maybe when the economy makes a turn for the better SB will reconsider entering the car audio market with a major OEM partner.

We made no secret of the fact that we are seeking OEM opportunities for our latest in-car technology.

Rob

"In fact Rio undertook some marketing. I'd say they spent far more money on marketing the car player than empeg ever did, but on the scale of things that's not saying much. This might have been more down to bad timing than anything - at the time empeg was acquired, Rio were running a brand name awareness campaign."

Was any of the marketing directed at the rio car specifically? I do remember the Rio ads, but it seemed more directed towards their rio handheld players. It doesnt really matter now, its all in the past. :-)

"We made no secret of the fact that we are seeking OEM opportunities for our latest in-car technology."

I know, but the public hasn't seen or heard anything happening yet. NDAs apply if something is in the works im sure. I hope to see another car stereo running empeg software someday.

If you just want to bring the Empeg back, call up Rio and order 1000. If you put the money up front, I bet they'd do it. You'd probably still have to sell it for about $1000 to make money, though.

Was any of the marketing directed at the rio car specifically?

Err, my very next sentence pointed out that these ads weren't related to ANY specific product. The purpose was to raise awareness of the Rio brand, so when you saw a Rio product in a store or on the net you would feel more confident in buying it. That's the theory!

Rob

Err...

Is that the british version of the american 'uhh'?

I don't know, I took French at school. American might have been more useful.

Rob

I don't know, I took French at school. American might have been more useful.

You're too modest, Rob; you speak better American than any Briton I know...

Peter

I remember seeing the RioCar in quite a few magazines too... it never got the attention it needed however..

ummmm I remember the ad campaign, I was wondering if there was anything going on outside of that. Someone mentioned they saw it in a bunch of magazines, I guess that answers my question.

Sean

In reply to:

---

Has anyone seen the HSX-109 at retail yet? Any ads for it?

---

Absolutely YES !! (Dont get me started) - It used to come up on my REPLAYTV as an ad all the time.

Errr, not really. Whilst we paid about $50 per cpu at the time due to shortages, the SA1110 CPU is sub $25. Even if you use a plain MP3 decoder (and as such sacrifice playing WAVs, OGGs, WMA, etc) you still need a decent CPU to do the rest of the stuff - playlist management, etc.

It's much more cost effective to just use a fast general purpose CPU. You'll notice that the iPod, Riot, empeg, Nomad, etc all use a general purpose CPU (or slight DSP spin in the case of the nomad 3, I believe) to run the HDD player software *and* do the audio decoding. This is for a good reason - trying to do it with less ends up in products like the Neo; yes, they play mp3s from a hard disk, but they're not very convincing.

Hugo

Pioneer have done something similar; it costs $2000. Sony have one too, it's $1500. Neither is particularly enjoyable to use or deal with a large music collection on, although both do rip CDs & have tuner/amp integrated.

Hugo

altman:

do you know anywhere I can get a credit card sized p4 mother board. You got any hook ups?

No, but http://www.linuxdevices.com have quite a few links to hardware suppliers. Worth a try.

A P4 unit may (a) run very hot and (b) take lots of power though. Most of the credit-card PC units aren't faster than about 233MHz because of power & heat concerns.

Hugo

> No products whatsoever were featured, including the car player.

i think this was the main problem. i am one of those people who were willing to buy a rio car, but when i've seen this product the first time, it had a price of 1800$. dont get me wrong, i dont want to say that you've tried to make much profit with it, but 1800$ is much money for a student. so for me it wasn't affordable. but it stayed on my wishlist. i don't know which price was the lowest that could have saved the rio car (in the end it was down to 375$ i think, but without profit for you), but if i had known that it was getting cheaper i would have watched it constantly and would have bought it as soon as affordable.

but i didnt read anything about lower prices in magazines or on websites. no reviews on geek hardware sites, no appearance on the frontpage of thinkgeek or something similar. nothing. maybe i wasn't reading the right websites, but i think it wasn't just me who suffered from this communication problem.

two weeks ago i wanted to check the empeg homepage to see if the price for this dream machine was still too high for me, but at that time it was allready over.

so if you ever plan to release something similar, please send some samples to computer magazines (non-US ones too, you see where people in the sales forum come from!) or to hardware review sites. and send them the whole pack again if you halve the prices. potential buyers must know if that happens! most of them don't have jedi-powers to simply sense this. people need to know that there is someone out there producing the things they are looking for for ages.

Keep in mind that the prices didn't drop into your affordable range until after they were already discontinued. The lower prices were a "fire sale" to get rid of the back-stock of the players they couldn't sell at profitable prices.

And they did send samples to magazines etc. I don't think they did enough, but that's just my opinion.

And they did send samples to magazines etc. I don't think they did enough, but that's just my opinion.

We were either reviewed or featured in every high end auto and ICE magazine we could think of, UK and USA. Reviews were mostly good. We also went to shows and events such as CES, IASCA Finals, Spring Bring Nationals and IFA.

Although the marketing is often slated (and is a sore point for many insiders as well) I'm not sure it was the main factor in lack of mainstream penetration. The product is actually quite widely known (more with the name empeg than Rio perhaps) in car audio and geek circles. That doesn't mean they want to buy it.

We only ever expected to sell a few thousand Mk.2's and it exceeded our expectations (although maybe not our hopes). People should stop seeing the Rio Car as a commercial failure and realise it was never the product for the wider market. Sadly nobody has yet seen the product that would have taken on that challenge.

Rob

We were either reviewed or featured in every high end auto and ICE magazine we could think of, UK and USA. Reviews were mostly good. We also went to shows and events such as CES, IASCA Finals, Spring Bring Nationals and IFA.

Ah. See, I think that might be the whole deal. I never read auto and ICE magazines. I've never been to an IASCA event or a CES.

If the ads and reviews had been in computer-related magazines in addition car-audio related magazines, I would have seen them. You've said it yourself: Geek toy. Perhaps its true appeal has always been mostly to PC owners who want to take their PC's music collection into the car. That's all I ever wanted to do, was to have the same kind of massive storage available on my PC in my car.

Agreed that non-PC-people could definitely make good use of the player, but its initial "wow" factor has the greatest impact on those who've already got massive MP3 databases in their PC.

Was the player ever in Crutchfield? That's the most popular car audio magazine over here, and I never saw it in there. The popular belief was that if you wanted the latest in car audio, you looked in Crutchfield.

If you don't mind me asking, about how much of the price of the player was profit (percentage wise)? I'm just curious.

I don't know how people here feel about PCMAG but here's a couple of timely articles about music sales being down since Napster Link and this one about price points Hard Drive based players link.

Try this for Biscuit PC Boards

No, the player was never in Crutchfield.

Well "geek toy" is an over simplication. "Rich geek music fanatic toy" might be closer to the mark. We were in T3 and a few other publications of that nature.

I really think the figures speak for themselves. We a know a LOT of people knew about the product, because when the price dropped they sold like hotcakes. We could sell tens of thousands of them at clearance price and take a big loss on each. Probably not wise.

I'm not really too interested in looking backward any more - this topic has been going for three years, and is less constructive now than ever.

Rob

I believe we were setting up a deal with Crutchfield right around the time the car marketing people were let go and product subsequently EOL'd.

Rob

I'm not really too interested in looking backward any more

You're right. It's just that new users on the BBS keep bringing up the topic.

believe we were setting up a deal with Crutchfield...

Must have been shattering that all the hard work you were doing with crutchfield and others and the rug gets pulled out from under you. At least you're all moving on to better things.

in five years time someone will make a product as good as the empeg/riocar is now and think they're a genius.

Nah not really, we went all the way with Car Toys and it couldn't be said to be a success. That is, we put in all the hard work, got products in stores, got demo products in showrooms, went to the road shows, trained staff, worked out a reasonable margin and so forth.

I would have liked to have seen the Mk.2 buried in January 2001 (*shock revelation*) and work started then on a consumerised replacement. We didn't have to lose all the neat geek features to get the price down and reach a wider audience - it was as much about refinement and manufacturing changes as anything. Ironically (in the context of this thread) it was SONICblue who insisted on making a large batch of Mk.2A players.

Rob

Yeah lets look forward to the thingy that is being cooked up just now in the top secret bunker in cambridge.

I will probably be better than the Mk2 to joe public and maybe better to us only they know

I was an ASIC CAD/EDA software support guy in my past life, and a designer now. You wouldn't have the quarter-million dollars for a custom ASIC, but you could do a custom FPGA that would have an ARM CPU, Ethernet, IDE controller, display controller, serial UART, etc., all built into a single chip. Most of these things have open-source hardware descriptions at:

http://www.opencores.org/

Plus, an FPGA would allow you to design *anything* you wanted into the hardware. You wouldn't be limited to assembling off-the-shelf parts.

Just a thought.

- Chris

You'd have to be careful about the ARM core; arm are very protective (look at what happened with PicoTurbo).

You'd also be hard pressed to get anything of the performance of a StrongARM out of even the very expensive FPGAs. I suspect that doing it with off-the-shelf chips will be cheaper in terms of design time and component cost - eg, replicating the ADCs/DACs/etc with a digital FPGA isn't going to be easy.

FPGAs are great for lots of things, but for shrinking a fast CPU with lots of cache (24k) plus lots of analogue I/O I would suspect you'd be barking up the wrong tree.

Hugo

"it was SONICblue who insisted on making a large batch of Mk.2A players."

Management....

Well, I'm glad you made more. Now I have 3!!!
I think, also, that this list may have 'higher bar' members than it might have otherwise. (this author excluded).

The MK2 is a good lead sales tool. WHEN you come out with a more consumerized version, I'll buy one for my parents and shove it down all my friends throats. (Should be easy, they're all engineers)

Management....

I just had to tell you about this incident in Germany:

A well known large US based company had a subsidiary in a town pretty close to my home. Well, about 200 people were working there and the company decided to built a new office building there. That plan was then realized about 1.5-2 years ago, the building cost was between 5 million US$ and 10 million US$. If my memory is correct, much closer to 10M$.
Well, earlier this year, the management decided to centralize all offices in Berlin and therefore fired 3/4th of the employees in that office, the rest was transfered to Berlin.

Now guess what they are doing with that new office building?

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

They are demolishing it (for some addition million dollars).

cu,
sven