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