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Music Media

SonicBlue's Digital Audio Center 163

Posted by CmdrTaco from the you-gotta-be-kidding-me dept.
grecorj writes "This article on the NY Times website (free registration blah blah blah) talks about SONICblue's new Advanced Digital Audio Center ; a digital entertainment hub which can store up to 650 hours of music. For $1500!" Here is a press release that has a bit more details. It sure does seem overpriced for only a 40G hard drive.
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SonicBlue's Digital Audio Center More

SonicBlue's Digital Audio Center

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  • Lawyer to engineer ratio? (Score:5, Funny)

    by mwalker ( 66677 ) on Monday December 17, 2001 @02:27PM (#2715705) Homepage
    Having already infuriated the entire television industry, SonicBlue was unsatisfied with it's level of legal disasters, so they have now gone and scared the bejeezus out of the RIAA.

    Well done. I won't be surprised if the RIAA & MPAA just drop the pretext and break out the laser-guided bombs. Where's SonicBlue's headquarters?
    • As long as SonicBlue can play the legal game just well enough to keep selling their boxes, the legal battles are free publicity for them. They get to ride the RIAA/MPAA-is-evil-let's-stick-it-to-the-man bandwagon all the way to the bank. If the opposition manages to actually prevent sales with an injunction of some kind, then they're in trouble.
    • If you're coming from san jose, drive north on 101 until you get past the san thomas expressway, start looking to the right. You'll see exodus, network associates, and then SonicBlue all in the same area.

      If you're coming south from San Fransicso on 101, drive past the great america parkway exit and look left. It's right there. can't miss em.

      Big buildings.

      Anyhow, enough trolling for me :P

      • NIT:

        If you're heading South on US101: then look left BEFORE you get to the Great America Parkway/Bowers road exit (i.e. after Fair Oaks.)
        If you're heading Norh on US101: look right AFTER you pass the Great America Parkway/Bowers Road exit (.i.e. before Fair Oaks.)

        You were close, but I stared at this every day before going to work at a certain low-power alternative x86 processor company for 1.5 years!
        Cheers,

        Ken
  • I wonder how long it will be before they sue Real and every similar product for copyright infringments.

  • heh (Score:1)

    by Schwamm ( 513960 )
    My computer cost a less than $1500, and it has a bigger harddrive

    Why do I want this?

    • Re:heh (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Darth RadaR ( 221648 )
      High-end audio components, such as a 24-bit, 96kHz Burr Brown DAC, deliver unprecedented audio quality from a compressed home audio player. 115dB channel separation 101.5dB S/N ratio 0.002% THD+N +0, -0.227dB frequency response (20Hz-20kHz)

      ...which will do more for sound than your usual Soundblaster. Hook up your PC to your stereo. Play a CD on your PC. Now play a CD on your regular CD player. Notice the difference?
      HTH, HAND. :)

      • I'm not a real audiophile but how does that performance compare with using the Audigy and SPDIF Out.

      • Re:heh (Score:3, Insightful)

        by tRoll with Butter ( 542444 )
        Notice the difference?

        Nope. Unless I put a different CD in the stereo's CD player... Those AOL CDs sound pretty bad. As MP3 has proven, you can lose imperceivable parts of even a "lowly" 44.1kHz 16-bit audio stream and most people *still* can't tell the difference.

        The range of human hearing is considered to be 20Hz to 20kHz. While you speak of DACs, have you looked at a more critical component yet - your speakers? Unless you're running a 12" or larger woofer, chances are (check your speaker's specs) - you're missing some of the low end. What about those tweeters? Sure, they may go up to 20kHz, but how many decibels does it drop towards the top end? Don't overlook your weakest link - your speakers.

        Finally, just enjoy the music. As the saying goes, "an audiophile is someone who listens to the hardware instead of the music".

        • Re:heh (Score:3, Insightful)

          by InstantCool ( 19982 )
          Would a true audiophile use a compressed digital format though? At this price range, this device is targeting two groups.

          1. Gadget geeks with loads of cash.
          2. Audiophiles who demand the best.

          These are smaller markets. It's hard to imagine a true audiophile who listens to most of his/her music in MP3 format. These are the people who complain that CD's are still missing something. They may be fine for most people, but if we are talking abut "most" people, then "most" people don't spend "$1500" on a piece of stereo equipment.
        • Think "hiss". S:N

      • Well, my $10 Soundblaster has an undocumented S/PDIF out that I can run to my receiver... why pay for a DAC in there that nobody who cares about high-end audio is going to use? (Or do high-end audio people buy cheap receivers and just run RCA cables from their devices?)
    • To any techie, these products seem absolutely absurd, and from a strictly practical point of view, they are.

      The reason that they still sell is that we are on a long slow trek towards the computerized home, and most people need their hand held for the journey. To someone who hasn't made it past ICQ and solitaire, the idea of computerizing their stereo is downright scary. Plus, no self-respecting yuppie wants an ugly beige box in their stereo case.

      In the meantime: techies will do the mods themselves; rich yuppies will buy products like this; everyone else will do without.

      The sales to the rich yuppies will eventually spur the market to produce cheaper models for the less rich yuppies to buy.

  • WTF (Score:1, Funny)

    by spatrick_123 ( 459796 )
    1500 bucks and it can't even play vinyl! Screw that.

  • Cost Split (Score:1, Funny)

    by Cougar ( 26289 )
    It's probably $100 for the 40 Gig disk, and $1400 for the "Digital Content Management"..

    No thanks, I'll stick with my 4 year old, 20 Gig jukebox/server.

    • Re:Cost Split (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      No thanks, I'll stick with my 4 year old, 20 Gig jukebox/server.
      Damn straight you will. If you bought a 20 GB drive 4 years ago, you're still paying off the mortgage on that beast.

  • High end audio stuff (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Hittite Creosote ( 535397 ) on Monday December 17, 2001 @02:30PM (#2715736)
    Well, judging by the difference in price of what this has and what my system at home has, they must have some seriously high quality audio stuff on it. Or are they just pandering to the music/gadget obsessives who think that more expensive means better?
    • Get a load of the features again:

      It's got a CD-RW drive, and 3 USB ports. It supports networking and copying to devices automatically. I for one am sick of all the hassles involved in moving music from the 'net to the PC to the player or CD. If they can add a built-in CD printer, I am so there. Even without, $1500 is a bargain for all the time and geeking you'd save.

    • High-Quality MP3 is an oxymoron. (Score:4, Informative)

      by Wakko Warner ( 324 ) on Monday December 17, 2001 @04:25PM (#2716291) Homepage Journal
      They could have the best, cleanest digital signal processors in the world in that box. Would it matter if the average moron encodes their MP3s at 128 or 160K? You're not gonna gain much from superior electronics if your source material is crap.

      SHN all the way for me...

      - A.P.

  • Competition (Score:3, Informative)

    by chancycat ( 104884 ) on Monday December 17, 2001 @02:31PM (#2715739) Journal
    This is competition for the HP (yes, Hewlett Packard) de100c [hp-at-home.com] home entertainment device.


    Good luck.

    • It is also competition for a bunch of products that OpenGlobe [openglobe.net] is working on. Fireball and the Entre have won some awards. So it looks like someone is in the market for these types of products. Personally, I see the value of a big old hard drive on your computer, but some of the things these things support as far as CD/DVD changer management are pretty interesting. For example, you can shove tons of CDs into a changer and set it up to record to mp3 300 tracks at a time.

  • Runs linux (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    2.4.13 and you can get a shell on it too ;)

  • You are supporting a patent monopoly........ (Score:3, Interesting)

    by jsimon12 ( 207119 ) on Monday December 17, 2001 @02:35PM (#2715756) Homepage
    By purchasing from SonicBlue you are supporting thier DVR patents, which are broad and unfair. Not that Tivo is much better by patenting similar items, but at the very least Tivo supports Linux, so they are the lesser of two evils (cause Micro$oft is in the mix now).

    As for price, 1500 dollars is CRAZY, when competeing products with the same capabilities are half or less. Anyway, the wave of the future is networked audio, cause then you can just share out your PC, and we all know how freaking cheap PC storage is (can you say 3 or 4 100 gig RAID 0 IDE's, for about half the cost of the SonicBlue).
    • Despite your anti-patents rant (BTW: their patents are broad, but hardly "unfair"), it's worth noting that it's SonicBlue, through their FrontPath subsidiary, that introduced one of the first Linux-based Transmeta-powered tablet computers on the market. Not only that, the box is entirely optimized for Linux. It now supports Windows, but that was a late addition - all development up through the first production test units was done with Linux. (I know because I was asked to help them get Windows properly running and certified on the box.)

  • Give the public what it wants! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by noser ( 114367 ) on Monday December 17, 2001 @02:35PM (#2715757)


    I don't understand why these companies can't come up with a product that would give the public what it wants... an all in one, home media server!
    If there was a device that sold at somewhere close to TIVO price ranges, and could store video and mp3 audio, throw in an ethernet jack, some svideo and RCA hookups on the back so we could connect it to the rest of the entertainment system, and a DVD drive so I could stream DVD's over the home LAN, everybody and his brother would want one.
    I don't think this type of product is too far fetched considering what you could already build from off the shelf commodity hardware and readily available free software. I know people are already working on hacking this type of device together.
    The only people who are going to buy this thing for $1500 have too much money and too little understanding of what they are getting for the money.

    • Give the public what it wants! An all-in-one, big-screen home entertainment personal flying device!

      If there was a device that had a 35" screen, a 10 terrabyte RAM cache, a 9 gigahertz processor, a jet-pack, and could fit in a purse or wallet, everybody and his brother would want one!

      I don't think this product is too far-fetched, if you take into account Moore's Law and magick pixie dust. I know of alchemists who are working on this right now.

      • That actually isnt a bad idea in itself, how many thousands of dollars have you personaly spent on your equipment. Now say Widgets Corp produced a product that had

        61" widescreen HD tv that was flat and fit on the wall
        A DVR that had a dvd and divx recorder and player(DVD-R/+R/-RW/+RW Specs aside)
        A Breakout box that you could install Port cards in so you would always have enough rca, s-vid, ethernet etc.. ports
        A high end Dolby Digital/DTS/THX stereo with dvd audio disc and mp3 playback
        A computer (nothing big, but must be upgradeable) say a 500mhz cpu

        You could share drives for a lot of this stuff, eg dvd/cd/mp3/vidcd/divx playback and record, say 4 100gb drives for the dvr, mp3, etc... And produce the whole thing for say 10,000. Id buy one and it's doable, but unfortunatly we will never see it in our lifetime.

        • And produce the whole thing for say 10,000. Id buy one and it's doable, but unfortunatly we will never see it in our lifetime.

          You'd be one of the very, very few.

          While logically, it is cheaper to buy all this stuff at once and garner a cost savings through integration, it will never happen, because while the long term cost is less, the short term cost is so damn high.

          If you can get this down to $1000, now you're talking. Until then, however, it's just mental masturbation.

    • Re:Give the public what it wants! (Score:4, Interesting)

      by renehollan ( 138013 ) <[rhollan] [at] [clearwire.net]> on Monday December 17, 2001 @03:47PM (#2716087) Homepage Journal
      Because the public doesn't have the home infrastructure for it yet.

      The problem with a "media server" is just how do you serve media? Until some form of home networking is ubiquitious (wireless, or ethernet), the media server will have to be a media client as well: quiet (i.e. fanless), spiffy case and display, come with a remote, and probably TV out for display. That kind of contradicts, "have mondo disk space for audio and video".

      A media server is little more than a glorified file server, perhaps with the ability to read local CDs and/or DVDs, and download content from the internet. Like a furnace, or water heater, it doesn't have to look nice or be particularly quiet. Of course, as long as it's going to be network connected, it may as well be a caching news server, non-relaying mail server, and the ntp gateway for the house. It might even firewall for you, but I prefer a dedicated router/firewall for that.

      Unfortunately the value that such a device provides only becomes apparent when you have (a) an always-on internet connection, and (b) a networked home: after all why bother loading all your CDs in a box in your entertainment centre, when they would be located in your entertainment centre anyway? Is it worth that much to not have to get up and change a disk? Even then, CD changers have gotten cheap. All the other functions that such a server can perform (oh, yeah, add answering machine), just can't happen without network connectivity.

      The real value of a media server is that it sits out of sight, and can have more storage added as necessary, with media clients scattered around the house. CDs and DVDs can be archived out of site as well. DVR functionality belongs here too.

      This simplifies what the media clients have to do... they basically become web browsers with audio and video outputs, and that's it. Some might have the ability to accept local media, but without local hard disk storage. Others might be fully integrated "receivers" with audio amplifier sections. Still others might be "televisions" with ethernet ports. But the common theme is to get the content stored elsewhere, whether streamed remotely, or cached on a media server in the home.

      Its a great dream, and one that I've had for a while -- I'm only now slowly starting to set up an uncompressed audio server, and will likely DivX encode my VHS tapes. But, for most homes, I suspect it won't become a reality until always-on network connections are the norm (so the other services can be provided), and traditional legacy devices start to be network aware (whether wired or wireless).

    • (don't mod this up, it's not worth it)

      "The American public knows what it wants, and it deserves to get it... good and hard" -- H.L. Mencken, 'The American Mercury'

  • I wonder... (Score:3, Offtopic)

    by pongo000 ( 97357 ) on Monday December 17, 2001 @02:36PM (#2715762)
    ...how much NYT pays for every /. submission that gets posted to the front page?


    Fight back...read the article here [yahoo.com], without the blah blah blah part.

  • That's quite expensive for a 3.9 MB hard drive. Oh wait? It's not 3.9 mb? My mistake, I just use the standard unlisted 'slashdot' bitrate of 8kbps.

  • Why the Obsession with Stereo Components? (Score:5, Informative)

    by dreadpiratemark ( 450962 ) on Monday December 17, 2001 @02:40PM (#2715778)
    What is this recent spat of discussions about stereo component MP3 players? Uh, I ran cables from the back of a standard Creative Live! sound card to my stereo system for a lot less than $1500. Even the more reasonable 'stereo component' systems still cost $250, which strikes me as a lot of money for not much more functionality. My total cost was about $40 (including the $30 for the MusicMatch Jukebox) by the time i got done with cables, etc - with it all running off of an old P200 I had sitting around.

    So, what does the extra $1460 get me here? A remote? A LCD screen? A CDRW? And a box that looks about the same size as an XBox that I will have to cram into my stereo cabinet.

    If you want a 40 gig MP3 player for your stereo that isn't based off of your PC, buy a Creative Nomad Jukebox retrofitted with a bigger HD from www.nomadjukebox.net [nomadjukebox.net] for 1/3rd of the price - and you can take it with you when you want to go somewhere! I just don't get this obsession with adding another large box to a stereo setup....

    -Mark

  • Rio = sonicblue = empeg. (Score:3, Informative)

    by rixster ( 249481 ) on Monday December 17, 2001 @02:42PM (#2715787) Journal
    Before you all start bitchin' about the non-open side of this, I purchased the "empeg" car player. Yeah it was pricey when I got it, and for another 30 gigs of drive space even more so, (it now has 50Gb on it), but it runs linux on arm architecture and for the 20 hour drive I just did yesterday from Milan to London, it was a damn godsend to listen to music I wanted to listen to. In fact, the only problem I had was that I had 11 days left of toons to listen to when I got back to my house....
    Oh, and the customer & techincal support people are the best. Take a look at geek.empeg.com to see what they give to the techies who want to prod under the bonnet of the thing... (and yes I'm too lazy to make it a hyperlink).
    • sonicblue did NOT invent the empeg.... they bought it.
      And when they bought it, it was already a complete product, in production, running linux, and it was designed by the designers to be uber-hackable. To change all that, revoke all the cool info on the website, etc, would be to toally screw over all the marketing already done for the product.

      • Re:Keep this in mind though. (Score:4, Informative)

        by phrenzy ( 105787 ) on Monday December 17, 2001 @03:41PM (#2716056) Homepage
        I'm not too sure what point you're making, but the HSX109 has been developed by the same team as the empeg. We even had some of our car player owners help with alpha testing.

        Under the hood, the new product looks a lot like the car player as it shares a common codebase. Of course there's a lot of new stuff, but it's still Linux and you can still hack at it if you want. As someone(one of our beta testers I assume) pointed out, you can even get a shell up on the screen. As soon as the unit ships there's certain to be a BBS just like for the car player (empeg.comms.net) and Receiver (rioreceiver.comms.net) where developers and users can get together and work out details for the software updates and so forth.

        Rob
        • That's great.
          My point was that just because they have one cool product (and it is cool) does not mean everything else they undertake will have the same level of cool.

          I didn't realize it was the same team working on it. If it's going to have the same level of openness, that's great.
      • oh keep quiet mindstrm.. *smacks you around*

        The guys who designed the empeg, did the software for this new box.. wait till people get a chance to play with it.

        Anyway.. the empeg guys _wanted_ to get bought by SB.. they were having a hard time keeping afloat with the empeg.

        and besides, all the really cool info is on http://empeg.comms.net
    • I don't know what tech support people you're talking to, but it sure isn't the SonicBlue people. My Rio Volt broke a week and a half ago, so I checked their website for a number to call to get help with it. The only number available was the priority support number, which costs $20 per call. There is no other number. So I e-mailed them, and they took 4 days to respond with an RMA form (they took 4 days to respond with a form). I filled out the form, and am now waiting for my RMA number and an address to mail this thing to. It's been 5 days. Meanwhile, I have to use audio CDs to listen to music, which I really hate, after having experienced the ease and flexibility of MP3 CDs. So I'm never ever going to buy anything they sell again, because it shouldn't take 2 weeks to do by e-mail what could be done in 10 minutes over the phone with adequate support. That's assuming that they get back to me this week, which I'm not entirely sure they will. I'm afraid they're just going to ignore my warranty requests. Suffice to say I won't be purchasing a Digital Audio Center.

  • overpriced? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Xzzy ( 111297 ) <sether@@@tru7h...org> on Monday December 17, 2001 @02:43PM (#2715789) Homepage
    > It sure does seem overpriced for only a 40G hard drive.

    I dunno, if the audio out is as high quality as they claim in the press release, 1500 seems about par for the course for good home stereo equipment. Especially for stuff in the "early adopter" category, it's always marked up a large percentage over what the price would be in a year or two.

    I mean if someone can shell out 500 bucks for some floor standing speakers and another grand on an amp/cd/radio reciever(s), that much cash for something state of the art shouldn't be too much of a shock.

    At least, it wouldn't be in that fantasy land I heard about once where worthless websites got sold for millions of dollars, so who knows how it'll pan out these days.

    • Re:overpriced? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by SomeOtherGuy ( 179082 )
      >> Especially for stuff in the "early adopter"
      >> category, it's always marked up a large
      >> percentage over what the price would be in
      >> a year or two.

      I have been an early adopter many times -- and i will eat my shoelaces if you can even find this thing (outside of return bins and tiger direct type deals) in a year or two. These companies are all 2 quick to come out with today's big thing and abandon yesterdays big thing at the drop of a hat....the only people who really suffer are the poor suckers who made the original purchase....still waiting for the first firmware upgrade on a product the company through out like sour milk.
    • It sure does seem overpriced for only a 40G hard drive.
      I dunno, if the audio out is as high quality as they claim in the press release, 1500 seems about par for the course for good home stereo equipment.
      Yeah, and can you imagine a Beowulf cluster of these?! :)

  • Yawn... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by gmhowell ( 26755 )
    And I thought the iPod was overpriced. At least that has firewire. This thing... Convergence where none is needed. Or, likely, where convergence won't work.

    It stores and serves up songs to multiple devices. Big deal. Several devices can do this for much less money. With more hard drive space.

    So I can copy CD's? I'd like to see the interface. For that kind of money, it better be easier to use than Nero. A lot better. A whole hell of a lot better. As in it should read my mind, figure out what tracks I want on what CD, and burn it by itself.

    Did anyone at this company not notice the dot-bomb fallout? Average slobs don't want this. This product appeals to those out-of-work dot-commers. And they're too busy trying to keep their Porsche out of the hands of the repo man.

    Will someone please go to their offices with a big freakin' clue-stick, and administer the beatings to those people who so richly deserve them.

    (BTW, how long until CT posts a glowing review of his donated 'review model'? Or, maybe he's already been denied one, hence the disparaging 'a bit pricey' comment? I don't know. But he sure has a lot of toys. And yes, I am jealous.)

  • Way more than just a PC (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Rob Parkhill ( 1444 ) on Monday December 17, 2001 @02:45PM (#2715803) Homepage
    Before you go whining about how "it's only a 40Gig hard drive" and "I can build the same damned thing for $19.95 using parts I found under my bed", take some time to look at this thing on their website. [sonicblue.com]

    $1500 is a whole lot of cash, but this thing offers a few other features, such as including a "RIO Receiver" in the package, and what looks to be a decent display on it. It also has ReplayTV-like capabilities to recommend music based on your listening habits. It doesn't even appear to be hobbled, since you can rip MP3 with it and transfer them to your PC.

    Sadly, it looks like it uses a 56k modem to access CDDB, even though it has a 10mbps connection as well.

    Sure, $1500 is a lot. But triple the storage space and drop the price to $1000, and I'm interested (in other words, by next summer I might have one...)
    • "Sadly, it looks like it uses a 56k modem to access CDDB, even though it has a 10mbps connection as well. " You can use the ethernet connection instead.

      In Sonicblue's press release
      "Built-in 56 kbps modem dials out to receive software and CDDB updates when necessary. Alternatively, you can use your home's broadband connection for even speedier downloads."
    • If you have one, it uses your broadband connection (HPNA or Ethernet via a USB->Ethernet adapter) to pick up tags and software updates.

      The modem is for people without a net connection of their own.

      In any case 450,000 CD's are on a local CDDB database so it doesn't have to go out to the net too often.

      Rob
    • The reason everyone is laughing at this, is because for $1500 you could build a pc with a couple hundred gigs, a soundcard with optical out to interface nicely with your stereo, a 15" lcd to display whatever the hell you want, 100Mbit, tvout, IR remote, etc, etc, etc. All that would be well under $1500. The only thing missing is a nice software package that has all the features, although there are individual packages to do everything except the playlist suggestion crap.

  • TV Out (Score:2, Insightful)

    by TheFlyingGoat ( 161967 )
    Why don't any of these things come with TV out standard? I'm building my own now for this reason. Sure, a big LCD screen is nice, and you don't have to worry about switching off the Packer game ;), but a TV screen would allow a very nice interface for a large collection. Maybe if this thing had TV out, the price wouldn't seem so outrageous.

    • Re:TV Out (Score:3, Insightful)

      by phrenzy ( 105787 )
      Some people prefer a TV output, others demand that their hi-fi components run quite independently of their TV. Having both is also a possibility.

      With this particular product we went the route of a local screen. It went down pretty well in consumer testing and beta testing.

      It costs more to put a nice LCD screen on than it would to provide TV output so your pricing comment doesn't really make sense.

      Rob
      • Just out of curiosity, did you consumer/beta test the tiny LCD panel on the Rio Receiver? The box itself works great, but that little screen is pretty much unusable unless you are standing next to it. Kind of a fatal flaw on an otherwise great product.
  • Wait, let me get this straight: $1499 for (1) a 40 gig hard drive and (2) a sleek looking case that fits into my home stereo system?

    What are these guys smoking?

    Two weeks agao, they come out with the obscenely priced PVR.

    Last week, they sue Tivo.

    This week, they have an obscenely priced hard drive/case that doesn't even play DVDs! Heck, even the ZapStation -- lame as it is -- has DVD capabilities.

    I realize this stuff comes down in price once it establishes its niche in the market place. And I realize -- to some extent, at least -- you gotta give SonicBlue credit for some forward-thinking in a pretty stagnant consumer-digital-recorder marketplace.

    But this price -- $1499 -- for a hard drive in a pretty case is beyond outrageous. It's beyond even "obscene." I mean, they're testing the waters here, I realize -- but come on!

    Now, if they'd *combine* their new DVR with this digital audio receiver -- and then drop the price to around 699 -- they *might* have an interesting product -- a Tivo, in other words, that can record sound and video onto a CDR or DVD-R (or whatever the format is). Sorta like a DVD version of the Terrapin video recorder that can not only record in every known format -- CDR, VCD, SVCD, DVD -- but can also output digitally (optical or coax) and also send video out across a home LAN --this might be interesting -- especially if the hard drive is upgradable.

    40 gigs is nothing these days. Yeah, it holds a lot of music -- 650 hours or whatever -- but what these people oftentimes don't realize is that once you have your 40 gigger filled, you don't stop. I mean, you keep getting *more* music. So 40 gig might be your "basic" music collection, but without any way to expand the 40 to over a 100 or so gigs -- or a way to swap out the filled hard drive for an empty one -- it doesn't make much sense.

    Even for those folks who have hundreds of CDs -- and who eschew the MP3 scene -- 40 gigs won't even hold a good amount of CDs. It'll hold a lot, sure, but then what are you supposed to use to digitize the rest of your collection? Spend another $1499 for another measly 40 gigs?

    LOL. How about just go into Best Buy, snag the latest and greatest Maxtor/Seagate hard drive for $129 and slap it into your computer.

    Assuming $129 is the current price of, say, a 40 gigger -- $1499 ought to buy, well, close to 12 40 gig drives. Which gives a total -- right? -- of around 480 gigs. Now, this is approaching a size that most folks would feel pretty comfortable with -- 480 gigs is a good sized chunk of storage.

    And -- finally -- why the hell doesn't some guy start making cool looking PC cases that fit in with stereo racks? I know there's the BookPC cases, but I gotta admit: the SonicBlue case looks pretty cool. I'd easily pay $199 or even $399 for a really, really cool looking case that I could line up with all of my other components -- my amp, DVD, CD, DirecTivo -- that looked like it was actually a component instead of a crappy looking PC case masquerading as a poor-man's SonicBlue digital audio receiver.
    • I agree.

      I know the sound hardware in it is probably better then the average computer, but $1500 is way out of range.

      A DVR / MP3 / CD-RW / DVD-RW now that would be on the right track!!!

      On the other hand if any one is willing to send me one I would give it a proper review. Do I have any takers?

    • Re:HAHAHAHAHHA! 1500 bucks? (Score:5, Informative)

      by phrenzy ( 105787 ) on Monday December 17, 2001 @03:33PM (#2716022) Homepage
      For some reason everyone seems to be adding up the cost of the hardware (and getting it very wrong - there's rather more than just a hard disk in there) and overlooking the software development.

      With a quick mental calculation, I believe there's around 10,000 man hours of work in the software of this product - not counting the hardware design and the ID, and not counting the significant code re-use from our common codebase. I guess some of you here will have a basic concept of the hourly rate of a good programmer..

      It's necessary to make back that investment, along with the many hundreds of thousands of dollars invested in design, tooling, marketing and so forth.

      ..and is our software worth all that effort? I think so. Perhaps some of you will have the good grace to reserve judgement until you've actually used it.

      Rob
      • Uh .. okay. 10,000 hours x $75/hour (pretty expensive programmers, too). $750,000. We'll double it to cover some of that code re-use. 1.5 MBucks. How many of these do you plan to sell? If you sell 1,000,000, then all that software costs a max of $15/box. (If you aren't going to sell a million, it wasn't worth building to begin with.)

        And I still don't understand what it has that a decent $1200 iMac doesn't have -- although the iMac would of course have a bigger hard drive & a few additional capabilities.

      • That's because everyone on /. seems to think that all software is free and takes no effort or time to design and code a *good* UI. They're wrong.
      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Target market - Audiophiles? (Score:5, Funny)

    by nyquist_theorem ( 262542 ) <mbelleghem@@@gmail...com> on Monday December 17, 2001 @02:53PM (#2715840) Homepage
    I can only assume from the pricepoint ($1500MSRP, so $1000+ street price, at least initially) that the average MP3-laden geek is not the target market here. In fact, the pricepoint may be one of the things that allows this thing to avoid (at least somewhat) some flak from the RIAA and its gang of enforcers.

    For an audiophile, this thing just might make some sense. First of all, the type of people who spend $300 on speaker wire [energenix.com] are obviously not concerned with value per dollar. Second of all, such folks also cling to the ridiculous notion that the rotational stability of a CD is of key importance [hometheaterhifi.com] to audio quality, with typical ghetto-trash (read sub-$5000) CD players incapable of reproducing their music faithfully. For these folks, having a device that would play their music buffered from a hard drive (with the device stashed far away and connected with Monster Cable Ethernet [amazon.com] would eliminate the need to worry about such things as spending thousands of dollars to isolate their hardware from any vibrations caused by their cat farting or toilet flushing [brightstaraudio.com]. (That last link rules) :)

    Seriously, a device that allows audiophiles to play their music from a non-CD platform, esp thru decent D/As, or even better, their multi-thousand dollar outboard D/As, would sell. The Linn Kivor [linn.co.uk], no doubt priced in the stratosphere, is one such example. My guess is that the SonicBlue DAC is about a tenth the price of the Linn.

    Sooo, while I'm not going to rush out and buy one, I'd still say it may find a market with audiophiles.
    • Except no audiophile worth the name would even touch MP3s, as an MP3 does not faithfully reproduce every last bit of sonic information on the CD. MP3 is a lossy scheme, and no audiophile would stand for it.
    • Actually, this can't be targeted at real audiophiles for one simple reason. Real audiophiles don't use onboard DACs. Instead they use seperate DACs produced by real DAC experts instead of using onboard ones. Additionaly, seperate preprocessing circuity is used to reclock the signal to exactly match the expected clock. I don't own a seperate DAC at this point, but I can hear the difference on other people's system. The people who build these DACs know far more about building them then any transport manufacture.
      • Read the specs again. It leaves you the option of using an external DAC: it has digital out.
        Man I hate people who comment without reading the facts.
      • Um, did you guys read the articles, or even my post in its entirety? Sheesh.

        The people who build these DACs know far more about building them then any transport manufacture.

        Did you even read the links? The thing has 24-bit Burr Brown DACs on board. You're saying Burr Brown doesn't know how to make DAs? LOL. Even more importantly for demonstrating the irrelevance of your outboard DAC talk, it also has SPDIF (digital optical for outboard DAs) out. So you can reclock and dither and jittercorrect and flux-capacitate your audio stream all you like.

        Also, sure lossy compression has audiophiles in a snit - but I am certain the device will play WAV files as ripped from CD. Even my $89 Sonicblue RV90 CD player does that. If not, it would obviously be the first thing they would add to the firmware.

        As for the audiophiles complaining about rip quality, well sure - thats why you could set it to rip at 0.1x, re-reading each track ten times (like Exact Audio Copy, the ripping proggy can do) to make *sure* the data is copied properly. Oh joy, perfect, checksummed copies of CDs! You could even go to www.more$thanbrains.audiophile.net and check the checksums from your rips against those published by TELARC and your peers to make sure you really got the correct rip!

        And imagine the money that could be made by shareware audiophiles making software-based rip/dither-to-24-bit/jitter-correct processing software!

        I love the guy who posted "nope they won't" in response to my post. Genius, innit.
        • With regard the ripping, you don't have to set any options to get a high quality rip. The ripping code was one of the big tasks in developing this product - it's all custom, designed by a ripping nutter (well his surname is Ripley so what do you expect), and it does an incredible job. It will rip stuff that causes CD Paranoia to quietly retire to the bathroom.

          Rob
          • Oh I don't doubt it. I only suggest it as an appeasement for the large number of audiophiles who are completely clueless as to how digital audio is stored and reproduced, and to what degree Reed Solomon and the gang are able to get data from point A to point B and back, intact, without the need for multi-thousand-dollar doo-dads and hundred dollar cables. The implementation of some kind of "rip verification" in the form of a CRC would probably help dispell the "every cd drive rips differently, I can hear it!" myth.

            "Besides, if bathing a CD in green light has proven to be beneficial, think of the benefits of flooding your entire listening room with it!" (heh sorry had to add that, from here [audiophilia.com])
      • Additionaly, seperate preprocessing circuity is used to reclock the signal to exactly match the expected clock.

        Dude, re-clocking your S/PDIF won't help at all if your cabling is the bottleneck. These guys can sell you a cable cooker [eaudionet.com] that should do the trick.

        Also, if you're looking to reduce jitter, you should definitely check out these fiber optic interconnects, with gold-plated connectors [monstercable.com]. I noticed a marked increase in presence and staging when I switched to their specially polished connectors.

        Gotta watch out for that jitter.
    • " ... Sooo, while I'm not going to rush out and buy one, I'd still say it may find a market with audiophiles. ..."

      No it won't.
    • It may find a market with them, but aren't these people likely to piss and moan about the quality of CD extraction, the lossiness of mp3's, etc?

    • Re:Target market - Audiophiles? (Score:4, Funny)

      by reaper20 ( 23396 ) on Monday December 17, 2001 @03:32PM (#2716016) Homepage
      Thanks for those links. I have tears from laughter in my eyes. I don't know what's funnier, the fact that Monster sells ethernet cables for $20, or this fine quote:

      Monster Cable JNOCNJHP3, September 20, 2000
      Reviewer: doy004 from Claremont, CA
      Worked great with my T3 connection at school. Ive noticed I get faster downloading speeds than with generic cables.

      Man .... too much ...
    • And you've also managed to Slashdot Amazon! (at least for the images)
    • Only $300 for speaker cable?

      You obviously don't visit the right audiophile websites [audioadvisor.com]. Try $2400 for speaker cable.

      Besides, no audiophile in their right mind would be caught dead buying crap from Monster Cable. Sheesh! Not when there is stuff even more expensive out there. :)

      However, in all seriousness. A lot of these audiophile components do have some basis in fact. The problem is that they take the fact and extend it with a more is better philosophy. The more being price, rather than actual substance.

      Quality cables do make a difference. We know this is the case with ethernet cables, although you don't need to spend what Monster asks for ethernet cables. Now I did replace the cables on my CD player from the ones that came in the box to Monster Cables I paid $20 for and it honestly did make a noticeable difference in sound. Now I might have seen the same benefit from a $10 pair of cables, who knows. But moving to $900 [audioadvisor.com] cables very likely has diminishing returns.

      On the otherhand the more expensive cables do have the benefit that they look cool. Some people are willing to spend a lot of money for something that looks cool [thinkgeek.com] but adds no real substance.

      It's also not surprising that a mechanical device such as a CD transport may be susceptible to vibration. But again, do you need to spend $1,000 to properly isolate it? Maybe not setting the CD player on top of the speakers is enough?

      Really I'm surprised you didn't mention the myth of the Green Marker [emedialive.com].

      • I've got a piece of wire I found outside after they did some repair work on the transformer for our 6-story office building. It's no ordinary piece- the stranded metal conductor is about an inch in diameter, wrapped in a strong rat-resistant rubber insulator. It's only 2 feet long, weighs about 4 pounds, an no one has been able to bend it with their hands. It would make a good weapon. It's aluminimun(sp) of course; copper is too expensive for the power company to use.

        So, I took it to my favorite hifi store and claimed it was silver speaker cable and I wanted to upgrade it. They said sure!
    • Just for anyone who didn't thoroughly peruse that link to Brightstar, check out this excerpt from a review:


      "The Altair is nothing if innovative. It's clear that a good deal of design and engineering has been expelled on this speaker system."

  • new definition (Score:1, Flamebait)

    by Transient0 ( 175617 )
    > "Designed as a core component for the ultimate
    > home audio experience, the Rio Audio Center
    > redefines home audio capabilities" said Andrew
    > Wolfe, Ph.D., chief technology officer,
    > SONICblue.

    Yeah, I bet...

    def'n: home audio capabilities - noun
    1. The ability to trick yourself into thinking that you're not just paying a grand and a half for a pretty box with blinking lights. 2. The ability to believe absolute tripe if the greedy greedy man saying it has the letters "Ph. D." after his name.
    -Oxford English Dictionary

  • Famous last words.... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by bahtama ( 252146 ) on Monday December 17, 2001 @02:56PM (#2715852) Homepage
    While the device is technically capable of being a distribution center for digital music, it is limited for now to sharing tunes within the home.``It is not a Napster server,'' he said

    I love when companies say stuff like, "There is no way that our equipment can be used in other way than what we made it for." :)

  • This seems quite similar to Apple's iPod. Both are innovative reworkings of existing devices. However, in both cases, the price seems excessive. This, like Apple's device, is an important step towards the synthesis of Home Computers and Audio equipment... let's see if they can get the price down.

  • hub (Score:2, Funny)

    by jaavaaguru ( 261551 )
    ...hub which can store up to 650 hours of music


    WOW! A hub with storage space! mine's only got 8 flashing lights and some ports!


    Seriously though, my MP3 collection wouldn't fit on this device so it's not that useful.

  • If I slap down 1500 clams for this system you can be damn sure I WILL hear the difference.
  • If they think they can have 650 hours in high quality music.
    • If they think they can have 650 hours in high quality music.

      Most people consider 128Kb MP3 "high quality". Most codecs get roughly 11:1 at that bitrate. Since that's about 1MB/sec, or 60MB/hr, you'd need 60*650=39000MB of disk for storage.

      And it includes a 40GB disk. Funny that..
  • ...a local store where I live in Calif is seeling a 100gig HD (7200 RPM) for $120. I could build you a better computer for cheaper than what they are selling thier product for ($1500). I mean, the technology they're using must be really good. Sure.
  • if you have the extra rack space (lord knows i don't) and money to burn (ditto) I can see why someone of a less techie nature would be interested in this product.target_audience my instincts tell me to use old skool laptop with external drive and plug into stereo input for much cheaper. You see the size of that thing!?!!?! I can tell them where to stick it ....cause it's not going in my stereo cabinet.

  • This may sound like heresy, but a lot of people don't want the "fun" of configuring a computer as an audio server. I can imagine a lot of people who don't want to mess with some cranky old Windows machine just to listen to music. (It's probably also heresy to say that to most non-enlightened folk, "Computer" means "a PC running Windows")

    Some of the features sound neat: 10x recording speed, USB download to MP3 players, CD burning, high-quality D/A converters, etc.

    I would be worried about what happens to users and support once the RIAA decides this thing violates motherhood, apple pie, and their stranglehold on the music industry.

  • Overpriced? Restrictive? Let's build our own! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by shooz ( 309395 ) on Monday December 17, 2001 @03:56PM (#2716126)
    A lot of people complain about these convergence devices -- how they are too expensive or too restrictive, and say to just build your own. But I really haven't found too many people who have! So lets price one out. My personal requirements would be:

    - A case that doesn't look out of place in the living room, but provides enough expansion for adding DVR capabilities
    - A soundcard with digital out for people with decent home theater equipment and capable of 24bit/96khz

    For a case, I've narrowed it down to the InWin IW-FT620 (http://www.in-win.com/framecode/ino_ft620.html) ($55) or the Yeong Yang YY-9301 (http://www.yeongyang.com/products/yy9301.htm) ($?? can't find it for sale anywhere). Although I'm not too sure if these cases require low profile PCI cards....

    As for a soundcard, the M-Audio Audiophile (http://www.midiman.com/products/m-audio/audiophil e.php) fits the bill ($150).

    I would also choose not to have a hard drive and boot off the network.

    I think this could be put together for under $500. Extra slots could be used for a tv-out card to play DivX, or some kind of DVD hardware, or even a gigabit NIC.

    Any thoughts?

    • The overlooked component (Score:5, Insightful)

      by TravellingDawg ( 535602 ) on Monday December 17, 2001 @04:30PM (#2716313)
      I've now read about eight kazillion posts on Slashdot from readers who say "the parts for convergence device Z are only worth $X, so why are they charging $2X? Ripoff!" Every one of these readers is overlooking the software that makes the gadget useful. That's encoded human expertise, and that's what the extra bucks are paying for.

      I mean, I could buy the ingredients for a steak dinner for much, much less than it would cost to eat that dinner at a fine restaurant, but those ingredients don't magically drive themselves home from the grocery store, combine themselves and jump in the oven, then levitate over to my dinner plate arranged artistically. You're paying for a master chef to work his/her magic on the ingredients and serve them up to you. It's the same principle with these convergence gadgets. Yeah, you could throw together an old PC, knock together some Visual Basic scripts and set it on the floor next to your stereo, booting it up & logging in & running a script every time you want to listen to a Britney Spears song, but it's not as nice and slick as the convergence gadget you plug in and run with a custom-built handy remote control.

      Try building one of these gadgets yourself. Work out the software and hardware problems without cheating and copying the interface of the gadget you're trying to emulate. Make it as slick as the commercial boxes and then let's talk about whether they are overpriced. Yeah, a TiVo or an UltimateTV or a ZapStation or an emPeg or an OpenGlobe looks easy to use (and therefore easy to build), but every one of these companies has thrown a team of engineers and artists at their products, and they've worked out a lot of problems that you probably wouldn't even think about for the first few months. Simplicity looks easy, but there's usually a lot of very hard work hiding behind it.

  • ...a k-rad, neato machine that lets us plug into a TV, play games and DVDs, has a hard drive and a REALLY fast processor, that costs ONLY upwards of $500 (plus the really useful accessories) and makes a software comglomerate filthy rich...

    ...Oh wait, we already have that too, don't we.

  • Ethernet (Score:2, Insightful)

    by zbuffered ( 125292 )
    If they're going to include 100mbps ethernet, why bother putting a HD on the unit in the first place? Why not stream the data over the e-net, from the larger, cheaper, more upgradeable HD in your PC? And if you're doing that, and seeing as to how most people would prefer the audio be input directly into their pre-amp via glass or RCA unconverted, what exactly are you paying for? The remote?

  • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • US Robotics makes a very inexpensive product called SoundLink which transmits MP3s from your computer to your stereo without any of that messy wiring to worry about. Only $80:

    US Robotics SoundLink Website [usr.com]

    For the kinds of prices these folks are charging, you could easily buy a dedicated PC and DIY for at least half the cost.
  • Ahh..I conquered the whole audio issue 6 years back when I ran RCA cables from the audio out on my sound card to the AUX in on my stereo (total cost was about $10 -- and I have yet to see anything that would make any solution much better -- however I have added the MP3 remote and serial IR from X10 a while back to get some remote control from across the room.)
  • By my calculations, assuming a 40 gigabyte drive, and a 650 hour storage capacity, and assuming MP3 fixed frame encoding, to be encoding their music at approximately 140 Kbit/sec.

    At a 320Kbit/sec rate, it looks like one could encode about 285 hours of music. Substantially different.

    Of course, not everyone feels the need to encode at such high bitrates.

    The cost of the player still doesn't approach the cost of the music. 285 hours of music, making an assumption of 40 minutes for your average CD works out to about 427 CD's worth of music. At $12.99 per CD, that works out to $5,546.73 worth of music purchasing to put on the $1,500.00 player.

    If you use their figure of 650 hours at approx 40 minutes for the average CD, you can store 975 CD's (at the lower bitrate), which would at $12.99 per album comprise a music cost to purchase of (brace yourself): $12,665.25.

    Suddenly $1,500.00 for the player doesn't look too bad stacked up against the actual cost of the music.

    Excuse me, I think I'm going to go enroll myself in consumer therapy now. I just calculated the cost of my own music collection over time at slightly higher than $12.99 per CD.
    • > Excuse me, I think I'm going to go enroll myself in consumer therapy now. I just calculated the cost of my own music collection over time at slightly higher than $12.99 per CD.

      Naaw, that just means you need to download more MP3z of CDs you don't own, until you no longer feel like Hilary Rosen's bitch ;-)

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