Hey, Empeg guys (and girls? - never heard of one - are there any?)!

You have hinted once or twice that your main line of work is actually OEM design work. Care to share with us info on some other fruit of your labor, besides the fabulous Empeg Car? Just curious...

Cheers!

Dragi "Bonzi" Raos
Zagreb, Croatia
#5196

No girls yet I'm afraid. We could make Daniel wear a dress but it wouldn't be the same.

We are currently undertaking a major OEM project which will hit the highstreet in the summer, but unfortunately this isn't something we are able to discuss in detail. Clearly OEM brands don't want their competitors to know what they have in the pipeline, and often they don't want their clients to know that the product was developed out of house.

The only OEM project we can talk about is the "MP3 Autochanger" that we developed for Visteon (the world's largest manufacturer of car components, an off-shoot from Ford). This is a car-player style product that mounts like a CD changer and connects to a standard Ford/Jaguar head unit. It is controlled entirely by the head unit and so lacks a lot of the features of the in-dash car player - but it is very easy for non-tech people to operate. Visteon are evaluating a number of prototypes but I have no idea what plans they may have for the technology. They showed prototypes to the public at Hanover last year, and at C.E.S this January.

Rob

This autochanger sounds interesting. What sort of storage does it use, and how does one load tunes and playlists into it? With a variation of Emplode or what? Or does it use CDs?

Tony Fabris
Empeg #144

> What sort of storage does it use

It uses a hard disk - one disk is more than big enough, because the product is restricted to 6 lists of 99 tracks (the same as a standard Ford autochanger). To increase the capacity each track can actually be a collection of tracks, but you can't select the "sub-tracks" independently.

> how does one load tunes and playlists into it

USB - if it goes into production it will ship with ripping/encoding software integrated into something like emplode.

Rob

Have a look here: http://visteon.wieck.com/image_database/wieck_preview_page_KOHANHANHANEJEEJEEJEEJEEJNEJGHANHANHAN.zip*p*VISpreview.html*p**preview*VISpreview.html*preview**thumb*VISthumb.html*thumb*
Is that an empeg without a display on the left?? (you might have to download the picture to get a decent look).

(list 6284, S/N 00299, 4 gig blue)

Well spotted :-)

That must be a very old photo, as they have some much nicer front panels now.

By the way, it's not simply an empeg without a display - although the board has much in common with the car player, it also has a number of differences (not least of which is the autochanger bus interface).

Rob