[Empeg-general] Re: Cambridge UK, hot bed of MP3 bits and peices

[Hugo Fiennes]

Yerse.... the price is "expensive", and it's not available yet.

Look more closely, and it's a PC in a nice box, with a multichannel sound card - you can run multiple audio streams from it, but this requires you to run wires everywhere. There's a multiple port expander (similar box with ethernet plus lots of audio outs) to get more ports.

Compare this to our thin-client solution which we licenced to Dell/Diamond (ok, I'm coming clean now that it's shipping ;) ) - the Rio Receiver. This sits on ethernet or PNA2.0 and does all the MP3/WMA decoding locally. It's cheap (<$250), has an onboard amp should you want it, burr-brown DACs, graphic LCD, IR remote, etc and you can plonk them down anywhere round your house for a very small outlay.

Not launched in Europe yet though. Grrrr.

Hugo