You are probably aware that the Rio division of SONICblue was recently sold at auction. The new owners decided not to purchase the car player support operation which remains with SONICblue, and as a result will be discontinued at the end of this month (May 2003).

Those of you who have car players in for repair will no doubt be worried about what will happen to your player. Please do not worry: all repairs will be completed and the players will be returned to you. For players undergoing warranty repair, there will be no charges as was agreed prior to you sending the player in. For players undergoing paid repair, there will be agreed charges to pay, again as agreed prior to you sending the player. There will not be any unexpected surprises.

The future of support for the players is as yet not determined, however we are hopeful that a good value and long term solution will be found. Negotiations are taking place right now and there will be further announcements about this in the near future.

In the mean time carsupport@sonicblue.com (or support@empeg.com ) will continue to be available at your service. Please note, however, that the last of the warranties have expired and so hardware servicing for newly reported issues will be on a charged basis in all cases.

If you have any questions about this, I would recommend that a BBS thread is a good place to discuss them, so that everybody can benefit from the answers.

Best Regards

Rob

To minimise confusion, I should clarify that "support" refers to customer service type support, i.e. Rob Schofield's role. This announcement does not affect software development or unofficial support provided via the BBS in any way.

Version 3.0-alpha1 of the car player software was released to the alpha team several weeks ago, and it remains our intention to get this up to beta release quality in the not-too-distant future.

Rob