Am I the only person who would like to see an Empeg with a Cd Player and Mpeg Encoder built in, so that you never need to take the Empeg out of the car. Maybe it could have a rotating screen like on the Kenwood MASK (I love that feature on my current head unit) or JVC Kameleon. I'm probably asking a bit much out of a DIN sized head unit, but I wouldn't mind having a separate hard drive unit anyway.

Anyone else want these features?

Blair

Nope, not interested... =)
Mainly because encoding would be a fair bit slower than on a PC, putting tags in would be a nightmare with the remote and remember that you can't (easily) pull tunes off the empeg, so if you wanted to change tracks, you would have to re-encode from the cd, instead of re-uploading from your computer.
In addition, a separate hard disc leads to all sorts of problems...
I'd rather use my computer for encoding and the empeg for playback; That's what they're best at... =)

Jazz
(List 112, S/N 00030, 4 gig blue)

One of the key premises behind the Empeg-Car is that you've got enough onboard storage that you don't need to meddle with CDs. For this I THANK the Empeg team -- my music collection goes everywhere with me now; CDs are a thing of the early 90's.

As for ripping -- I would think that having a built-in ripper would subject Empeg to all kinds of scrutiny regarding copyright laws. Again, I'm thankful that there's no such support in the unit because that kind of scrutiny could kill a good thing... (You know how lawyers can be...)

There are also the issues of space and cost: A CD-unit would occupy crucial space and add to costs. I'm sure a lot of vehicles don't have double-DIN space to which the unit can be installed -- reducing who would actually want it (i.e. demand) and causing costs to remain high as time passes.

The last issue I see is one of maintenance: If you couldn't remove the unit how would you upgrade it? Take your PC to the car? (Most people don't have laptops...) I ask because another premise of the Empeg-Car is that it can be upgraded to support new audio formats as they take hold in the marketplace; rather difficult to do if you've weighted the unit down by adding a CD reader such that it never has to be removed from the car -- and even if you could remove it would you want to lug all 10 lbs of it around???

I'm with Jazzwire on this one...

-- Bleys



"If you would judge, understand." -- Seneca

Here's the default answer:

We have no plans to integrate a CD player into our empeg Car product.

We did consider this option, but decided against it for a number of
reasons: some practical, some commercial, and some because of our own
opinions.

Starting with the practical ones:

1. There just isn't enough room.
When things like power supplies and a decent display on the unit are taken
into account, there is very little space left for a huge CD-ROM drive.
Even laptop drives would fill all of the space currently filled with the
hard drives.

2. Durability.
Most CD-ROMs nowadays are made to be cheap, not durable, due to the ever
shortening cycles of PC development and higher CD speeds. When you throw
in the things like wear on bearings from spinning a CD in a moving,
vibrating vehicle it becomes apparent that you really need a custom in-car
CD-ROM mechanism, which aren't thick on the ground.

Both these problems could be solved if we were a huge audio company, who
has mechanisms and designs for these things which could be adapted for
CD-ROM (as opposed to CD-audio) playback. But we're not - yet! Adding MP3
playback to a normal CD-audio player isn't as easy as putting a MP3
decoder into the output stream: CD-audio data (a) runs at the wrong data
rate and (b) uses an error-spreading technique on the audio stream, as
opposed to an error-correction, sector-based technique for CD-ROMs.

Next, the commercial reasons:

1. Limits the market to those with CD-recorders.
You need a CD-recorder to use such a device. CD-recorders are expensive
items, have a habit of being a pain for novices to get working reliably,
and so on.

2. Appeals to music pirates.
Although it appears that Diamond have emerged victorious over the RIAA,
we're not being complacent, and we do not want to be seen as encouraging
piracy. Whatever people say, the RIAA and other music industry
organisations are rightly worried about CD-R owners, and associate them
with piracy, which being honest is what most of the CD-R drives are used
for, in one way or another.

Finally, our personal reasons:

1. Not big enough!
The idea with the empeg is to have *all* your favourite music with you at
all times. As the idea was go get rid of swapping tapes or CDs, it seems a
backward step to end up swapping CDs, even if they hold 12x as much as
they did before. With the release of the new IBM 14.1Gb laptop drive, the
empeg can now have up to 476 hours of CD-quality audio all inside the
unit!

2. Breaks the database.
On the empeg, the music is organised in a database. This allows you to
specify tracks to be played by various categories and to bring together
different moods of music with ease. With a handful of CD-Rs, you lose this
'anything, anytime' freedom that you get with a hard disk. It also doesn't
lend itself well to maintenance of the database: for example, modifying
the criteria on a tune stored on a CD-R (say, recategorising Ash from
Britpop to Indie) is a major pain.

I hope you can see our reasoning, even if you don't agree!

Regards

Rob