Hi,
in the current issue of german c't-magazine (one of the leading german magazines for IT-Pros and -Geeks) there is an article on MP3 Car Radios including a test of several products, amongst them the Riocar. Other products in the test are
-Aiwa CDC-MP33R
-JVC KD-SH99R
-Kenwood KDC MP6090R
-Likko LKM016
-Panasonic CQ-SRX7000N
-RockfordFosgate RFX 94000 R
-Microboss Car DVD Family
all of these are of course „normal“ CD-Receiver-Headunits with the additional functionality of playing MP3s. No actual comparison to the Empeg! The only „real“ competitor was the
-Traxdata mStation
The test focussed very much on practicability of MP3-Playback with the units, including navigation features, working with different bitrates, display of Tag-Informations etc. Audio quality was another important feature though.
The Empeg – well Riocar – got very much approval. The display, the navigation features and the consequent use of the Jog-Dial were especially mentioned. Navigation was labeled „exceptional“. The author stated, that he accomplished control and navigation without even having to consult the manual (I second that!). The test device wasn’t equipped with a remote control, so the tester didn’t even know about the search functions. The tester stated, that his fellow workers were especially impressed with the visualizations whereas he seemed to doubt the necessity of this feature. One criticised point was the missing possibility to download files back from the Riocar on the computer (hmm, never felt the need to do that).
The biggest argument against the Riocar was the price. It was given as „ca. 4000“ DM (refering to the 10GB-Basemodel, which was obviously tested). Compared to the mStation price of 1599 DM with the same diskspace the Riocar simply had to loose! I wondered how this price came along, because if I ordered the base modell right now in the empeg shop, it would cost me around 2500 DM (if I computed the exchanges rates correctly). Another statement was, that the Riocar wasn’t available yet. I emailed the author of the article about this and he replied to me, that this was an official statement by SonicBlue. He told me (translated by me) „The Riocar will be sold at the stated price in a slightly different version starting by October in Germany.“ (I wonder what this version will be and why anyone would pay that much money for it?)
It seems like there was some confusion either at SonicBlue or between SonicBlue and the c’t-magazine. Not a very good way to get good promotion for their product anyway. The conclusion of the article was that the CD-Reiceiver-Headunits were mostly half-hearted solutions with poor navigation-capabilities (BTW: The panasonic, which is a CD-Receiver as well, doesn’t even play back MP3-CDs, you can only feed it with an additional SD-Card! And this baby costs around 3000 DM!). The Riocar was judged as very sophisticated but way too expensive (judged by the 4000 DM!), so the mStation was more or less the winner in this test. Thats sad because the mStation seems to be (having read the test on it) technically inferior to the Riocar. If they would have taken the correct price into consideration, the outcome would surely have been different!
Just wanted to let everyone know about. German speakers can find parts of the article online at http://www.ct.heise.de. Sorry for any errors ot typos, as you may have guessed by now, I’m a native german with school english and no dictionary nearby!
Wolfram
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