Well it seems I made a terrible horrible mistake when I ordered my Rio Receiver from TigerDirect...
I made the mistake of only ordering one! And now TD seems to no longer be selling them
Does anyone know of any places selling these at less than the $170 that SonicBlue (and everywhere else it seems) is selling them at? (It's a reasonable price for an excellent product, but I can't afford quite that much right now).

Thanks in advance...

Crutchfield was selling them for $149 without the Phone Networking card. You may want to give them a call.

Tigerdirect told me they have order placed for 1000 units that is supposed to be in on February 5. They had 338 units out of those already spoken for and decided not to take any more orders for it until they actually had them in stock. Of course, thats just what they told me on the phone and who knows if the price is going to be the same when they start selling them again.

Computers4sure also claims to sell them for $163 each, as does techonweb for $154 and askwebs for $156. There also quite a few listed on amazon.com, including some used ones for $145. You can also find a number of places claiming to sell it on cnet.com. I personally found about 40 places selling them and quite a few ebay listings. Just do a google search on "rio receiver". The lowest prices, with the exception of tigerdirect all appear to be around $150 though.

-Biscuits

I think Rio must be dumping this stock as the number of Ebay listing of these items has rocketed 100 fold since 1 month ago.

in mid to late December there were about 2 or 3 on sale in Ebay, now there must be dozens for sale.
One guy is dumping them at 99.95 - which is the Tiger Direct price, but he charges $USD15 shipping - which may be more than TD charge for the same item.

All Ebay items are listed as 'brand new factory sealed' units, which would imply they come from the same warehouse as TD's stock does.

Either this product is going the way of the RioCar [i.e. EOL'ed] or its making way for a newer model.
To be honest I expected the Empeg guys to have been working on a sucessor to the Mk1 RioReceiver by now, and the fact that they are planning on tweaking the software after the RioCar release 2.0 software is out is another indication a newer model is on the way I think.
But I have no idea how long it will be before its released and/or what the price will be - certainly not $USD99 each for a while!

They've been pretty tight-lipped about what exactly is happening with this unit. They've said in the empeg forums that they are working on new projects: maybe this is one of them. The fact that they are still working on the rio car software seems to imply that they expect other products to use it, and the Rio Advanced Digital Audio Center seems to need something like the Rio Receiver.

Either Sonic Blue is making a lot of money on selling so many of these things or they are losing a lot of money on clearance. It could be either way. It would be interesting to know how much the development / per unit cost is. If they'd just advertise, they could sell a heck of a lot of them at these prices, since this seems to be in a sweet spot for the market.

If they are coming out with a new unit, I wonder if it will have more functionality, cheaper cost (to the manufacturer), or both. I saw a -probably uneducated- guess at the cost per unit of these at $80. If that's true, these are some slim margins. I suspects that estimate is off by quite a bit though.

P.S. Tigerdirect charges something like $10-12 for shipping.

-Biscuits

I agree with your comments.

Given that TD are selling thousands of these units - heck they've sold out of their initial allocation and have presold 33% of the next batch, then that presumably (@$80 per unit 'cost' to SB) several hundred thousand dollars of moving stock no longer on their books. Let aone what other outlets are selling them too. TD is not the only one - hence these ebay auctions.

Perhaps SB needs the cash, or maybe they need warehouse space for all those HSX109s yet to be shipped, (or even, the next generation Receiver product.)

The HSX 109 does need a device something like this, its odd that the Receiver is being sold off so cheaply now, but then again if you stimulate the market for distributed 'room based' mp3 playback devices, then a portion of these customer will want a central server to put their mp3s on, and that is the HSX-109.

There is also the 'mumble mumble' device that Hugo mentioned at Xmas time when people complained about the large 3.5AMP power brick they got with their firesale Empegs.
[which Hugo indicated is used for a device of some sort - 3.5 amp@12-16V DC is a pretty hefty 'consumer level' power supply].

The RioReceiver is due for a overhaul - there are some design issues with the current design - 4MB of onboard RAM being one of them, small and hard to read display another.

I guess that the car software is being used in another device [like the Receiver] in another guise -SB woudn't fund the v2 release if the software was a dead end - which clearly it is not - even if the guys were working on it in their spare time.

Go to www.zdnet.com - they will give you the prices that several vendors offer.