The empeg MP3 car audio player (empeg-car) is a product of Empeg Ltd of Cambridge, UK. Please visit their web site for complete pricing details and ordering instructions. Note that due to the enormous demand and limited availability of this product, a registration queue has been put into place such that orders are taken on a first-come, first-serve basis.
At the time of this writing, pricing was as follows:
Product | Approx. Capacity |
Price (including VAT) | |
---|---|---|---|
Car Player 4 Gb | 70 hrs | US $1,099 | UK £799 |
Car Player 6 Gb | 100 hrs | US $1,199 | UK £899 |
Car Player 10 Gb | 170 hrs | US $1,499 | UK £1,099 |
Car Player 20 Gb | 340 hrs | US $1,949 | UK £1,449 |
Standard Blue display | included | ||
Green or Amber display | US $20 | UK £15 | |
Additional car mount | US $40 | UK £30 | |
Shipping (varies by country) | US $42-64 | UK £9.40-30.50 |
Please note these are not official prices but merely those known to be current at one time. Visit the official Empeg Ltd site mentioned above for current information!
Contributed by Rob LeslieThis one does come up quite often. It's not the case that 90% of people want a CD based player - especially after they've heard our reasoning against that.
Here goes with the standard response:
We have no plans to integrate a CD player into our empeg Car product.
We did consider this option, but decided against it for a number of reasons: some practical, some commercial, and some because of our own opinions.
Starting with the practical ones:
Both these problems could be solved if we were a huge audio company, who has mechanisms and designs for these things which could be adapted for CD-ROM (as opposed to CD-audio) playback. But we're not - yet! Adding MP3 playback to a normal CD-audio player isn't as easy as putting a MP3 decoder into the output stream: CD-audio data (a) runs at the wrong data rate and (b) uses an error-spreading technique on the audio stream, as opposed to an error-correction, sector-based technique for CD-ROMs.
Next, the commercial reasons:
Finally, our personal reasons:
I hope you can see our reasoning, even if you don't agree!
Contributed by Rob VoiseySome people seem not to need or want to connect them, but it is generally recommended that you install the audio grounding leads at your amplifier and ensure that no other part of the exposed audio cable ground touches any part of your car's frame (i.e. ground). Quoting the empeg user guide:
There are two pairs of audio outputs, with an output level of approximately 3.2v RMS. These are driven in a quasi-differential fashion, and so the ground of the audio output is NOT the car earth: it is a ground sense from the amplifier ground to provide better audio quality. You should take care to ensure that the ground of the audio outputs (i.e. the phono/RCA jack exterior) does not touch the car bodywork: if they do, this will not damage anything, but it will result in reduced audio quality. In practice, this usually means wrapping insulation tape around the audio connections after they have been connected to the in-car wiring.
You should ensure that the supplied audio grounding leads are used at the amplifier end to tie audio ground to amplifier ground, allowing the floating ground outputs of the empeg to function correctly.
The empeg is perhaps unique among head units in this respect. There's a chance your professional audio installer will fail to see a reason to connect the ground leads for you, so you may need to carefully point it out. If, after showing the user guide to the installer and explaining why the ground leads are needed and your installer still refuses to properly connect the leads and your resulting audio quality suffers, you ought complain to the installer to correct it (and offer you an apology for poor service.)
See also the next section on audio quality.
Contributed by Rob LeslieThe empeg has a lot of fast digital signals which could bleed over onto the audio stage. One way to provide good isolation from this is to use a "floating ground" whereby the audio ground is completely isolated from the digital and chassis ground. This provides good noise isolation inside the player, but an audio circuit must be grounded somewhere, and most amplifiers are also floating ground - therefore we provide cables to ground at the amplifier end.
The analogue wizardry behind this is a little heavy for most of us, but it
works :)
The grounding cables use gold plated RCA's which are pretty much the same electrical spec as the metal bodied connectors on the car mount - they just don't look as nice. The signal cable in the grounding leads, although thin, is very high quality hifi rated cable. You can rig up your own ground tap if you prefer, though.
Contributed by Rob VoiseyTune to the correct frequency. Press DNPP and one of the digit keys to store in that preset. There are ten available (0-9) currently. Just press a digit key alone to recall a preset.
Please note that this will change quite a bit since the DNPP button will
not be available in tuner mode for much longer :-)
Unfortunately, you cannot. The USB on the empeg is a slave port. You need a USB master to drive the adaptor and the empeg doesn't have one and won't have one. The empeg folks have said that:
You can, but you'll void your warranty in the process. For details from someone who's done this, see David Moore's page about adding a HDD to your empeg.
Contributed by Rob LeslieIt is not. The DSP audio system is output only; the CPU has no way of reading digital audio data that it did not originate -- from the tuner, for example.
Contributed by Patrick ArnoldIf you have some information, software, or tidbit that you think might be helpful for others, we encourage you to submit it so it can be added to this site. We welcome all contributions, and we will attribute each submission to the author. Please contribute!
Have a question not answered by this FAQ? If you send us the question, we'll find the answer and post it here for the benefit of everyone. Send your question to ask@empeg.mars.org.