I was browsing Pioneer's site and came across this new product:

DEH-P90HDD

This thing sounds really cool. It's got a CD player which also reads MP3 CDs. It has a 10GB HD. It can encode from CDs or from the radio onto the HD. It has a built-in Gracenote database for identifying CDs. It even has a memory-stick reader and player.

Here's some more info I found:

Tom's Hardware

This was announced at CES. Did anybody see a demo of it?

Hugo saw it, and even got a video of it on his handycam. He's got a lot of opinions about it, I'll let him reply here if he sees this thread.

The only two major empeg-competitors at CES were this unit and the Sony unit. And from what Hugo told me about them, they aren't much competition, for various reasons. One of them had a pretty interesting mechanical fold-down face, but beyond that, I thought the empeg was a much more useful product with more features. If only for the storage space alone.

The unit with the neat mechanics was just an MP3 CD player.

The UI's on both the Sony and Pioneer units leave a lot to be desired, if you're used to the empeg. I daresay we'll come up with something or other to keep them on their toes

Rob

I daresay we'll come up with something or other to keep them on their toes

you already have its called a mk2

Sadly it got canned a few months before the perfect realease date. If Rio relaunched it in a few months after sony and pioneer have done the hard work it would sell like hot cakes.

Sony and pioneer will have great difficulty in designing something as nice as the empeg as they are so used to building machines with 10 to 20 buttons with an interface that sucks big style. My girlfriends pioneer is horrible to use and that is only a single disc cd player.

In reply to:

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Sony and pioneer will have great difficulty in designing something as nice as the empeg as they are so used to building machines with 10 to 20 buttons with an interface that sucks big style. My girlfriends pioneer is horrible to use and that is only a single disc cd player.

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Although I'm with you 110% (I've seen nothing yet that comes even close to the empeg UI) you seem to have missed the 24 buttons on the remote , but even without these 24 buttons the UI performs extremely well.

If Rio relaunched it in a few months after sony and pioneer have done the hard work it would sell like hot cakes.

Yeah, especially with something like this winning Best of CES in the auto category:

Echo Mobile

If anything, this will increase the chances of someone wanting to buy the Mk. III from Sonicblue...

Uuugghh! that things horrible!
what a kludge. you need a changer with a digital i/f for it to rip CDs prbably in real time, blah blah blah. We've said it all before.

And that wins best of CES??

That Pioneer unit is complete shwag! I'd take my empeg over that any day!

Let's see... It's only 10gb, uses ATRAC compression (Only up to 132kb!), there's no way to synch via ethernet or USB, and it probably isn't hackable in the slightest. Yuck! The playlist structure probably sucks nuts compared to the empeg, too...

OK, so it's "XM Satellite Radio ready", has a built in CDDB library, has a built in amp, and can play CDs & MP3 CD-Rs.

Big deal. They just don't get it, do they!?! Well, at least they're trying.

Damn I'm happy with my empeg!

built in amp trust me this is a bad thing and i would love to see how good the tuner is living in the same box as the electronics and hard drives.

That is the reason the tuner went external on the mk2 after being internal on the mk1 i think.

No kidding.

Well, hats off to 'em if they found a way to cram all that in there without any side affects.

As for us, we have our doubts...

you need a changer with a digital i/f for it to rip CDs prbably in real time

It does not rip. According to the PDF datasheet, it That web page says it "captures analog audio signals, stores them in ... digital format, and plays them back on demand." So, of course, it's real-time only. And although it says the music database is searchable by title, genre, etc., it doesn't say how the titles and genres get there for tracks recorded in analogue ("does not require a PC", yeah right).

It's an interesting hack but is not to be confused with doing it properly.

Peter

But did anyone check out the price on that sucker? $2100 I am glad I purchased an Empeg for $1400. I could live without the $700 cd add-on.

plus for 1400 you got usability

has anyone heard does the pioneer unit use an OS ?

I've seen nothing in any literature to indicate that the Pioneer unit did not rip. It has a local copy of the CDDB to get all track data to populate the ID fields. Capture of analog signal and then being able to "play on demand" plainly indicates Rip and Store. There's no "on demand" if it didn't store the music.

That unit would probably do very well at a price point under $500. At over $2000 it doesn't have a chance to penetrate the consumer space.

Bruno

Peter was talking about the Echo Mobile unit not ripping, not the pioneer (which does rip, but doesn't copy mp3s from CDROMs to the hdd)

Hugo

It has a local copy of the CDDB to get all track data to populate the ID fields.

You know, I 've been wondering how they would be able to enter/update the mp3 tags if it wasn't possible to connect the unit to a PC. But a local copy??? That would mean that it would be impossible to enter the mp3 tag data for every cd I want to add that has been made after I bought the unit. Or is that local cddb file updatable? In that case mmmm....
Still think the idea stinks though.

You know, I searched up and down the thread to make sure what he was talking about and I couldn't find the mention of another product.

Bruno

I'm pretty sure I have read that you can update the CDDB on the Pioneer. I believe it might be done via CD, but I could be wrong. Anyway, you don't have to worry about it for your new albums. Because you can just put them on your empeg after having tagged on your PC and not worry about the Pioneer unit.

Bruno

My thoughts exactly! I figure it will be years before there will be another product as good and as functional/versatile as the Empeg. That's why I've taken my precautions and got myself 3 units now. Two will be used on more or less permanent basis, the third one won't leave it's box until one of the other two gets damaged beyond repair.
Pioneer and Sony still got a long LONG way to go. And the funny part is (if you like that kind of humour) that those new units cost approx. the same as the Empeg did. For a lot LESS features. If those things become a success, it will tell a lot about how stupid people really are. AND SonicBlue, for never having marketed the product properly.

The Pioneer guy told me you need the memory stick slot and a PC with memory stick interface to update the CDDB.

Embedded CDDB also features on the Rio HSX-109 - 450,000 CD titles are in the on-disk database. It also has online lookup though, unlike the Pioneer.

Hugo