SonicBlue's Digital Audio Center

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.

Lawyer to engineer ratio?

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?

Watch out *Juke

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

heh

My computer cost a less than $1500, and it has a bigger harddrive

Why do I want this?

WTF

1500 bucks and it can't even play vinyl! Screw that.

Cost Split

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.

High end audio stuff

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?

High-Quality MP3 is an oxymoron.

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

This is competition for the HP (yes, Hewlett Packard) de100c [hp-at-home.com] home entertainment device.

Good luck.

Runs linux

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

You are supporting a patent monopoly........

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).

Give the public what it wants!

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.

Re:Give the public what it wants!

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).

I wonder...

...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.

woah.. expensive..

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?

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.

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).

Re:Keep this in mind though.

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

overpriced?

> 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.

Yawn...

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

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...)

TV Out

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.

HAHAHAHAHHA! 1500 bucks?

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.

Re:HAHAHAHAHHA! 1500 bucks?

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

Target market - Audiophiles?

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.

Re:Target market - Audiophiles?

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 ...

new definition

> "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....

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." :)

iPod of Home Audio?

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

...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.

HEAR THAT??

If I slap down 1500 clams for this system you can be damn sure I WILL hear the difference.

Must be bloody good compression

If they think they can have 650 hours in high quality music.

It's only 40gigs...

...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.

old school laptop with external drive

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.

Because it's *not* a computer....

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!

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

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.

What's next...

...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

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?

What happens when the hard drive croaks?

I didn't see anything about mirrored hard drives. What happens when the hard drive goes "clunk-clunk"? For $1500.00 you'd think they'd give you redundant hard drives.

For $1500.00 you can build a nice PC with an IDE raid card and two much bigger hard drives and still have enough money left over for a turtle beach audiotron.

-ted

Inexpensive wireless MP3 to your stereo

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.

Whats the big deal?

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.)

Musing on hours, bitrates, and costs.

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.

Re:Couldn't Buy ZapMedia, so they made their own

No, it's using the same software that powers the empeg car player, which is kick ass itself...And if the Audio out sound quality is even half as descent as the car player, I'm going to buy one...

Re:Couldn't Buy ZapMedia, so they made their own

No, the software was developed in-house by the team-formerly-known-as-empeg.

Rob

Re:can you back it up????

Hmm, well if you're a geek you probably already voided your warranty and could just swap out the disk yourself. It's a regular ATA IDE disk with ReiserFS (a builder for new disks comes with the product on CD).

Rob