Errr, not really. Whilst we paid about $50 per cpu at the time due to shortages, the SA1110 CPU is sub $25. Even if you use a plain MP3 decoder (and as such sacrifice playing WAVs, OGGs, WMA, etc) you still need a decent CPU to do the rest of the stuff - playlist management, etc.

It's much more cost effective to just use a fast general purpose CPU. You'll notice that the iPod, Riot, empeg, Nomad, etc all use a general purpose CPU (or slight DSP spin in the case of the nomad 3, I believe) to run the HDD player software *and* do the audio decoding. This is for a good reason - trying to do it with less ends up in products like the Neo; yes, they play mp3s from a hard disk, but they're not very convincing.

Hugo

Pioneer have done something similar; it costs $2000. Sony have one too, it's $1500. Neither is particularly enjoyable to use or deal with a large music collection on, although both do rip CDs & have tuner/amp integrated.

Hugo

altman:

do you know anywhere I can get a credit card sized p4 mother board. You got any hook ups?

No, but http://www.linuxdevices.com have quite a few links to hardware suppliers. Worth a try.

A P4 unit may (a) run very hot and (b) take lots of power though. Most of the credit-card PC units aren't faster than about 233MHz because of power & heat concerns.

Hugo

> No products whatsoever were featured, including the car player.

i think this was the main problem. i am one of those people who were willing to buy a rio car, but when i've seen this product the first time, it had a price of 1800$. dont get me wrong, i dont want to say that you've tried to make much profit with it, but 1800$ is much money for a student. so for me it wasn't affordable. but it stayed on my wishlist. i don't know which price was the lowest that could have saved the rio car (in the end it was down to 375$ i think, but without profit for you), but if i had known that it was getting cheaper i would have watched it constantly and would have bought it as soon as affordable.

but i didnt read anything about lower prices in magazines or on websites. no reviews on geek hardware sites, no appearance on the frontpage of thinkgeek or something similar. nothing. maybe i wasn't reading the right websites, but i think it wasn't just me who suffered from this communication problem.

two weeks ago i wanted to check the empeg homepage to see if the price for this dream machine was still too high for me, but at that time it was allready over.

so if you ever plan to release something similar, please send some samples to computer magazines (non-US ones too, you see where people in the sales forum come from!) or to hardware review sites. and send them the whole pack again if you halve the prices. potential buyers must know if that happens! most of them don't have jedi-powers to simply sense this. people need to know that there is someone out there producing the things they are looking for for ages.

Keep in mind that the prices didn't drop into your affordable range until after they were already discontinued. The lower prices were a "fire sale" to get rid of the back-stock of the players they couldn't sell at profitable prices.

And they did send samples to magazines etc. I don't think they did enough, but that's just my opinion.

And they did send samples to magazines etc. I don't think they did enough, but that's just my opinion.

We were either reviewed or featured in every high end auto and ICE magazine we could think of, UK and USA. Reviews were mostly good. We also went to shows and events such as CES, IASCA Finals, Spring Bring Nationals and IFA.

Although the marketing is often slated (and is a sore point for many insiders as well) I'm not sure it was the main factor in lack of mainstream penetration. The product is actually quite widely known (more with the name empeg than Rio perhaps) in car audio and geek circles. That doesn't mean they want to buy it.

We only ever expected to sell a few thousand Mk.2's and it exceeded our expectations (although maybe not our hopes). People should stop seeing the Rio Car as a commercial failure and realise it was never the product for the wider market. Sadly nobody has yet seen the product that would have taken on that challenge.

Rob

We were either reviewed or featured in every high end auto and ICE magazine we could think of, UK and USA. Reviews were mostly good. We also went to shows and events such as CES, IASCA Finals, Spring Bring Nationals and IFA.

Ah. See, I think that might be the whole deal. I never read auto and ICE magazines. I've never been to an IASCA event or a CES.

If the ads and reviews had been in computer-related magazines in addition car-audio related magazines, I would have seen them. You've said it yourself: Geek toy. Perhaps its true appeal has always been mostly to PC owners who want to take their PC's music collection into the car. That's all I ever wanted to do, was to have the same kind of massive storage available on my PC in my car.

Agreed that non-PC-people could definitely make good use of the player, but its initial "wow" factor has the greatest impact on those who've already got massive MP3 databases in their PC.

Was the player ever in Crutchfield? That's the most popular car audio magazine over here, and I never saw it in there. The popular belief was that if you wanted the latest in car audio, you looked in Crutchfield.

If you don't mind me asking, about how much of the price of the player was profit (percentage wise)? I'm just curious.

I don't know how people here feel about PCMAG but here's a couple of timely articles about music sales being down since Napster Link and this one about price points Hard Drive based players link.

Try this for Biscuit PC Boards

No, the player was never in Crutchfield.

Well "geek toy" is an over simplication. "Rich geek music fanatic toy" might be closer to the mark. We were in T3 and a few other publications of that nature.

I really think the figures speak for themselves. We a know a LOT of people knew about the product, because when the price dropped they sold like hotcakes. We could sell tens of thousands of them at clearance price and take a big loss on each. Probably not wise.

I'm not really too interested in looking backward any more - this topic has been going for three years, and is less constructive now than ever.

Rob

I believe we were setting up a deal with Crutchfield right around the time the car marketing people were let go and product subsequently EOL'd.

Rob

I'm not really too interested in looking backward any more

You're right. It's just that new users on the BBS keep bringing up the topic.

believe we were setting up a deal with Crutchfield...

Must have been shattering that all the hard work you were doing with crutchfield and others and the rug gets pulled out from under you. At least you're all moving on to better things.

in five years time someone will make a product as good as the empeg/riocar is now and think they're a genius.

Nah not really, we went all the way with Car Toys and it couldn't be said to be a success. That is, we put in all the hard work, got products in stores, got demo products in showrooms, went to the road shows, trained staff, worked out a reasonable margin and so forth.

I would have liked to have seen the Mk.2 buried in January 2001 (*shock revelation*) and work started then on a consumerised replacement. We didn't have to lose all the neat geek features to get the price down and reach a wider audience - it was as much about refinement and manufacturing changes as anything. Ironically (in the context of this thread) it was SONICblue who insisted on making a large batch of Mk.2A players.

Rob

Yeah lets look forward to the thingy that is being cooked up just now in the top secret bunker in cambridge.

I will probably be better than the Mk2 to joe public and maybe better to us only they know

I was an ASIC CAD/EDA software support guy in my past life, and a designer now. You wouldn't have the quarter-million dollars for a custom ASIC, but you could do a custom FPGA that would have an ARM CPU, Ethernet, IDE controller, display controller, serial UART, etc., all built into a single chip. Most of these things have open-source hardware descriptions at:

http://www.opencores.org/

Plus, an FPGA would allow you to design *anything* you wanted into the hardware. You wouldn't be limited to assembling off-the-shelf parts.

Just a thought.

- Chris

You'd have to be careful about the ARM core; arm are very protective (look at what happened with PicoTurbo).

You'd also be hard pressed to get anything of the performance of a StrongARM out of even the very expensive FPGAs. I suspect that doing it with off-the-shelf chips will be cheaper in terms of design time and component cost - eg, replicating the ADCs/DACs/etc with a digital FPGA isn't going to be easy.

FPGAs are great for lots of things, but for shrinking a fast CPU with lots of cache (24k) plus lots of analogue I/O I would suspect you'd be barking up the wrong tree.

Hugo

"it was SONICblue who insisted on making a large batch of Mk.2A players."

Management....

Well, I'm glad you made more. Now I have 3!!!
I think, also, that this list may have 'higher bar' members than it might have otherwise. (this author excluded).

The MK2 is a good lead sales tool. WHEN you come out with a more consumerized version, I'll buy one for my parents and shove it down all my friends throats. (Should be easy, they're all engineers)

Management....

I just had to tell you about this incident in Germany:

A well known large US based company had a subsidiary in a town pretty close to my home. Well, about 200 people were working there and the company decided to built a new office building there. That plan was then realized about 1.5-2 years ago, the building cost was between 5 million US$ and 10 million US$. If my memory is correct, much closer to 10M$.
Well, earlier this year, the management decided to centralize all offices in Berlin and therefore fired 3/4th of the employees in that office, the rest was transfered to Berlin.

Now guess what they are doing with that new office building?

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They are demolishing it (for some addition million dollars).

cu,
sven