As you may have worked out, Tony is one of our Beta testers

Yeah, after I made that post, I realized it would be kind of obvious.

What I tested was actually a piece of prototype hardware-- raw electronics in a big square plexiglass case.

I haven't actually tried running DisplayServer on the thing (been afraid to), but EmpegTaxi worked to grab files from it via USB. The only thing is that the USB port timings changed on one of the beta builds and EmpegTaxi quit working (would drop packets). I haven't tried EmpegTaxi against the latest software yet...

Now, your question is why would I WANT to run displayserver and empegtaxi on the thing? Why would I want to grab MP3s off of it?

How about this: it is the single easiest way to rip CDs that I have ever seen. You literally stick a CD into the thing at it does the rest. It is so brain-dead easy it's not even funny.

And the ripper itself is a nice piece of work. It is really good about recovering mangled CDs. I would even be surprised if the new copy-protected CDs were even a slight bit of trouble for it. Although I don't know if anyone's tried a copy-protected CD in it or not.

The ripping is kind of neat... it does a full-bandwidth rip of the raw wave data to the hard disk, then it shelves the encoding as a background task. This allows you to keep feeding it CDs even if the encoding stage isn't complete for a given CD. You can see an icon on the screen which indicates whether it's still encoding or whether it's done with all the background work.

The user interface is very nice. Very simple. Very easy to get stuff done. My only complaint is that it works "sideways" from the empeg-car interface. In the empeg-car, the down button is the confirm/enter button, and on the HSX-109, it's the right button. If you're used to the empeg-car, It takes a little getting used to, you have to remember that you're operating a different device with a different UI and you'll be fine. Once you see the user interface, you'll understand why they did it this way and it all makes sense.

Those who have complained about the CDDB... well, it's no different than if you ripped it yourself. In other words, you will find the occasional typo, the frequent incorrect case on titles, lots of inconsistencies in the artist names, etc. So if you are a stickler for accuracy, then yeah, you still have to go in and fix things. But it's pretty easy to do that from the new Emplode. You can also do it from the front panel with the remote if you like (a bit more cumbersome), or if you happen to have a USB keyboard, you can plug it straight into the thing and do the edits that way. Or you could just shine it on and live with the occasional typo, it's fine if you do that. Most people will just leave the tracks as they are. Only the anal-retentives like me need to worry about fixing CDDB typos.

Broadband connectivity works nicely if you get a $30.00 usb-to-ethernet adapter. Everything is configurable (DHCP, gateway, etc). Or you can just use HPNA connection if you like. My house has really sucky phone wiring so HPNA worked spotty for me. 10BaseT worked great, though. You can get software updates that way. Those are also brain-dead easy. You just pick "Search for new software updates" and it goes and does it. It downloads the entire software update into a temporary file on its hard disk, then applies that as an upgrade file internally. (Note: This is the code that will eventually allow the car player to do software updates with USB or ethernet.)

Sound quality is very good, as you would expect. However, on my prototype box, the outputs were a little "hot" and would occasionally clip. I was told this was a known bug on the prototypes and would be fixed by the time the hardware went into production.

It squirts tunes into portables very easily. I don't know if anyone caught this in its description, but it automatically stores two different bitrates of each rip: One for regular playback and one for the portables. You can choose what those bitrates are. You also have the option (the beta testers bludgeoned the empeg guys into adding this feature) to completely prune all of the extra for-portables rips just in case you want to store only full-bandwidth tunes on its hard disk.

There's no option to squirt tunes into the Empeg Car yet. I sure hope it gets in there soon. My dream is to use this thing to re-rip my entire collection at 256.

If you want to add a bigger hard disk, it should be very easy. Just plug the new disk in, feed it the software installation CD (comes with it), and follow the on-screen prompts to "restore to AS NEW" and it'll wipe the hard disk and repartition it for you.

My overall impression of the thing is as follows: It is SO MUCH BETTER than using your PC as a music server. In the same way that the Empeg Car is better than any other car-based music solution, this is better than any home-based music solution. Combined with one or more Receivers it's awesome.