A friend told me about it pretty early on...

pca

Best post in thread award goes to... Patrick!

rmitz told me.

I heard about it when utterly hacked off that Kenwood wouldn't follow my idea for an in car mp3 computer. They argued that copyright issues meant they wouldn't touch it with a bargepole. I then went off the idea for a bit and when I next searched, Hugo had completed his mp3mobile and the newsletter was happening.

Everyone who has been for a drive with me has loved the empeg, and some are now seriously interested in buying one.

Just the standard slashdot articles for me. I read them all, but as a high school student it was way out of my price range. I nearly built an in car computer, but never got around to it. Freshman year of college, I got a new car and was looking at putting a minidisc changer and CD changer in dash. The next year when I heard about the fire sale there was never a question of what was going in my dashboard.

My seccond empeg was the last ones of the firesale, from the time period when they'd put them up as they presumably found them in the back of the warehouse. Together they're the best $700 I've spent.

Matthew

I discovered them during the MKI days, I believe on the original website. Friends and I sitting around discussed how great it would be to have your MP3 collection in your car, and somehow we stumbled across the empeg site and were amazed. We sent the link to all our friends but didn't get much response. They looked great but were just too expensive for us.

I had nearly forgotten about them, but luckily a friend (mafisto here) didn't. He discovered the BBS and must have lurked off and on. Once the firesale started, he called me and told me about it. We both ordered 60GB versions then, I suppose at that point we had better jobs and suddenly it felt affordable and worth it.

I still have my original in my car. I've got the car under a cover in the garage right now, but it'll be out when the snow stops flying. Even though I can stand to be away from it a while (the 6CD MP3 changer in my truck helps), I still love the empeg. In fact, I just ordered 2 new drives and the Eutronix button kit / installation service tonight

I read about it back in college while browsing the hardware mp3 players section of the old mp3.com. I didn't have a car or a paycheck then so just wrote it off as one of those fantasy things that I couldn't afford yet. I always remembered it, but didn't keep up with the news. I had no clue about the firesale until 2003 and started searching on e-bay. I was so excited to get one and for a price I could handle too! I consider myself lucky to have it.

It was 1999 and a friend of mine and I were often talking about MP3s. I was not too enthusiastic at the time, since making them from a CD would, in my view, take way too much time , but both of us thought they could have a future. One day he sends me a link to the Empeg website, showing, at the time, Mark 1and the waiting list for Mark 2. "Hey, here's the future of MP3s!" he says. I agreed, but had no car to put an empeg in.
In Feb 2001 I order my VW Polo. 4 months in the waiting list. Can you belive that?
Meanwhile, I go back to the empeg website, and Mark 2 is there, so fantastic, on paper. But I am really not planning to buy one: I don't know the company, and I believe a HDD would break after a month of car usage. BUT I send an email, asking all that I was curious about. Unexpectedly, I get a reply! And what a reply! Those people were nice, quick, knew what they were talking about, and after a few emails I realized the empg was not a joke on a webpage! In few days, I had ordered my mark2 with a 10Gb hdd.
I got it before my car arrived, and I remember enjoying it so much even BEFORE installing it in my car, which, to me, was simply unbelievable!
Nobody knew what it was. I had to explain and show it to my installer and my friends. Some of them bought their empegs, later on, making my hometown the one with the highest concentration of empegs in the country, I believe

And, as others said, after 5 years it's virtually the only peice of technology since 2001 that I still use every day Best money I've ever spent

Happy new year, everybody!

I saw a mention of it in a posting on a Nissan Frontier forum. I balked at the price until I did a bit of research into mp3 capable CD players, and compared them with the empeg.