The review is short, fluffy and has no depth.

I'd like to continue and expand a little bit on what debauch has said here.

Of course the review was short, fluffy, without depth. They are reviewing the empeg as a music making device, not as a computer, and quite justifiably so. The empeg IS a music player, first and foremost. That's how it was conceived, designed, built, and marketed. I can tell you, as an empeg owner who is much closer to the "Joe Consumer" image than is typical on this bbs, the empeg is a pretty damn intimidating piece of equipment to operate.

Think about it -- you install a CD player in your car, you slide a CD into the slot, and music comes out.

Contrast that with the empeg. You insall an empeg in your car. Then you install an amplifier in your car. Then you have to have access to a pretty powerful computer. Then you acquire software that can rip your CD, and more software to convert it to an MP3 file. Then you have to install emplode software, and deal with configuring a COM port so you can load the latest software into the empeg. Then you have to make a USB connection so you can actually get some music inside the empeg (if you're lucky, that is... :-( ), so that at some later time you can get it out. In the process of getting the music in, you deal with the concept of hierarchical playlists, using a program that looks a lot like Windows Explorer, but that doesn't follow the same rules as Explorer. You're gonna spend a lot of time figuring out all the little quirks of that program before you can make it do what you want. So, after all that, you have the empeg in your car, its full of music, now you start burrowing down through menus, using a remote control whose button labels have absolutely no correlation with the functions of the player. (Yeah, I just love to DNPP my empeg!) Select Playlist, then choose between a little arrow-triangle-thingie (sorry to get so technical here...) or a genre selection. Then choose between another arrow-triangle-thingie and an album name. Then choose to play the album, or pick a song. Then press the wrong button, and start all over again... Eventually, it will play music. But look what you went through to get there!

Yes, I know: with the incredible power and versatility of the empeg comes an unavoidable increase in complexity of operation. Please understand, I love my empeg. The guys@empeg have done a magnificent job. The more I use it the more impressed I become. Now, re-read the previous sentence. I have had three weeks to use it, and learn it, and figure out how to run emplode and figure out workarounds for balky software. I now know how to use possibly 25% of its capabilities. The people that reviewed it had a few days, maybe only a few hours. Even though these are computer geeks at heart, they are still reviewing a music player and they are comparing it with players that they can put in a disk and have music come out and then be prepared to comment on the quality of that music.

So be honest -- what would your reaction be if you were not particularly computer literate, you were used to operating your CD player, and somebody set this empeg thing on your desk and told you that it could hold a whole lot of music and it only cost five times as much as your CD player, and all you needed was a computer, a bunch of software, a bunch of cables, and (by the time you finished loading it with music) a hundred hours of your time to make it work?

Geez -- it sounds like I'm really trashing the empeg. I don't mean to do that at all. It is a fantastic machine with capabilities completely unmatched in the industry. Just don't expect a stereo reviewer with only a limited amount of time and incentive to discover and appreciate those capabilities.

tanstaafl.

"There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch"