I'm sure this has been discussed before but how many
empegs were made exactly? 4,000?

Does 4,000 include mk1,mk2, and mk2a? How many
of each were made?

from the FAQ

The total number of existing players in the world is about 4000 Mk2/2a players and about 350 Mk1 players, and no more will be made

So, if you own an Empeg, you're one in a million. Even if every one were sold in the U.S., there would only be one per 65,000 people. I suspect half or less were sold in the U.S., so increase that number accordingly. And of course, some people bought multiple units. The highest concentration per capita may be Britain, but it'll probably still be something on the order of 1 per 50-100,000.

I keep on seeing people brag about "I just got a new MP3 player! I can now have 25 songs on each CD!" As opposed to only 15 songs on each CD? Or maybe you can fit 40 really crappy songs on there. Woohoo, I'm impressed. I'd say, either get something high-end, like the Empeg, Phatbox, etc. or keep your existing CD player/changer. Anything else you buy costs a lot of money and time (burning CDs) and will be obsolete in a couple of years. They really aren't much better than regular CD players anyway, so why spend $400 for the aftermarket?

-Biscuits

Recently I bought someone a CD based mp3 car stereo as a gift. It's a Rockford Fosgate something or other and IMO it's a complete pile of crap! No IDx tag support, instead it uses ISO9660 filenames and scrolls them across the display. Song navigation is near impossible and the display lights up like a christmas tree on acid! In truth mp3 was an afterthought or more likely, hardly thought about at all!
Slightly on the plus side (compared to the examples you gave) it stores on average ~100 good quality mp3's on a CD-RW.

All things considered though, it makes a 2nd hand empeg @ $500-$600 look like even more of a bargain

Slightly on the plus side (compared to the examples you gave) it stores on average ~100 good quality mp3's on a CD-RW.

Well, assuming an average of about 200kbps (which is what my --alt-preset standard seems to come out to, or maybe a little more), a 700MB CD could hold 467minutes of music (assuming no filesystem overhead, but this is a little bogus anyway, so I'll ignore it), as opposed to, what, 80 minutes of CD music?

Alternately, I guess you could look at CD audio being about 1411kbps, right?