Ok, the BBS says it has 2134 registered users. From reading the comments many own more than one empeg and that about 4.5K empegs were produced.

I'm impressed by those figures as it means that empeg users are a pretty dedicated bunch. But my question for today is roughly how many empeg owners do not visit the site or viewed another way, just how many people have more than one unit?

If you have 4500 Empegs and take an average cost as @£1,000 that's £4,500,000, I'm no accountant, but how (and thank goodness it did) did it ever get to production?

Did the guys have a rich Uncle, or the Bank manager I,ve been seeking all these years?

If you have 4500 Empegs and take an average cost as @£1,000 that's £45,000, I'm no accountant

Perhaps you'd like to edit that post, or you might get a lot of clever dicks replying to say "No sh*t you're not an accountant"...

Peter

Thanks for that, I don't know how I did that , the thinking was right, but it didn't get to my fingertips!

Still in my judgement, the R & D could well have been much more than that, but I guess that they had the other projects concurrently.

I may not be an accountant, but I have run my own company for 20 years, successfully!

Still in my judgement, the R & D could well have been much more than that, but I guess that they had the other projects concurrently.

We didn't, of course, make all 4,500 at once. Early, small production runs helped pay for later, larger ones. And a lot of car-players were pre-ordered; it's easier to raise money to build something if you can prove that people will buy it once it's built.

Peter

Only about 1500 units were financed by empeg - the rest were made by SONICblue. Those first 1500 units were still hard to finance, along with the R&D (which was cheaper than it might have been, since we all worked for peanuts back then). Hugo and Steve took a big personal risk with empeg - hats off to them. At no time did we ever use VC.

Rob

Don't get me wrong, my original observation was purely in admiration. As I say, I've run my own company for 20 years and I couldn't imagine going to my bank manager and saying: "I've got an idea for a new product involving complex electronic engineering, using emerging technologies which will retail at a premium price with no firm idea of the marketplace, which currently seems to be young internet users, who wouldn't seem to be the obvious people to be able to afford it!"

But again, thank goodness they did, I'm probably the least techi customer, but music mad.

I remember when I first took it to be fitted in my Range Rover and the fitting specialist looked at it and said, I've never seen one this well made before.

Again, thanks to all that I'm enjoying the benefit of such commitment and enthusiasm

A little off the topic, but I was curious if I can tell what production number my empeg is from just the serial number.

In reply to:

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A little off the topic, but I was curious if I can tell what production number my empeg is from just the serial number

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Well there's this which means mines April 2001 #04192

well i know at least 2 owners who refuse to register at the forum.. dunno why.. guess there not geeky enough.

wow, that means they made a lot of units in a short period of time. Mine is #1805 made in Jan 2001 and if yours (Shonky) is #4192 made in April 2001. Looks like they were busy. Also looks like I need to read the FAQ's again.

Mine comes out to January 2001 - #01962, so I would say the Mark IIa's were a large # / short time deal, too.

What I'm curious about is this;
What was the serial of the Last unit made, and who has it.

On a related note, about a week after I got my first unit - and the day after I finished the install - I went back the SonicBlue estore to order another. The page said they were sold out of the 30 and 60 gig units, but I went ahead and placed an order anyway for a 30. I assumed I was too late, but thought what the hell..... The next day, at about the same time (11:30ish lunch), I was checking email to see if any order confirmation had come. Danged if the doorbell didn't ring, and there was Fedex with a unit! I went back to check the SonicBlue estore, and found they had taken down the order page altogether.
I got the order confirmation the next day.