MP3 meets Car Audio: Empeg Mark II in-dash Car MP3 Player

The empeg car Mk.1 improved upon Hugo’s original MP3 Mobile design and took the first steps towards producing a truly commercially viable car MP3 player.

The first thing the empeg car Mk.1 boasted over the original MP3 Mobile was that it made use of a much more specialized CPU.  Instead of simply adapting a desktop CPU for use in a mobile application, Hugo and his team of 3 other engineers, made use of the Intel StrongARM processor.  They used the S-1100-DA in particular which is a very general member of the StrongARM family.  Operating at 220MHz, the low power processor features a 24KB L1 cache (16KB data + 8KB instruction set) and was the heart of the Mk.1. 

The Mk.1 featured a total of 8MB of 60ns FPM RAM which if you’ll recall was what was found in most desktop computers prior to the assimilation of EDO DRAM seemingly ages ago.

The display on the Mk.1 was also much more advanced than the original 16-character VFD that was on the MP3 Mobile.  The Mk.1 again featured a Vacuum Fluorescent Display with a 128 x 32 resolution and the ability to display 2-bits of color per pixel, obviously making it a grayscale display. 

Obviously in order to make the Mk.1 “fit in” as a car audio product it would have to be able to resemble the rest of a car’s controls and displays, thus the Mk.1 featured swappable faceplates each with a different color tint.  The Mk.1 featured a total of three different color faceplates, blue, green and amber, each with an anti-reflective coat that helped to improve visibility in sunlight.

The front panels of the Mk.1, although making it a bit more of an aesthetically pleasing unit, did not hide the fact that the unit was still far from a polished design produced by a Sony, Pioneer or any other major manufacturer.

For storage, the Mk.1 made use of a drive tray that could accept up to two 2.5” Notebook Hard Drives.  The reason for using a 2.5” drive instead of a cheaper, larger and more readily available 3.5” unit is because the 2.5” drives are naturally more geared towards mobile applications than their 3.5” desktop counterparts.  Remember that your car is a constantly moving and vibrating environment, such a great amount of stress on your average 3.5” desktop drive would not be well appreciated.  Going over speed bumps or potholes shouldn’t result in any sort of skipping in your MP3 playback and shouldn’t decrease the lifespan of your player, the Mk.1’s drive cage and 2.5” drives made sure neither of these two problems plagued it. 

The smallest drive you could find on a Mk.1 player was a 4GB version, which was the entry level empeg player.  Using a rough conversion of 1MB of audio per minute (128Kbps quality), the 4GB player could store up to 70 hours of music.  For the true MP3 fiends, the Mk.1 was offered with up to 20GB of storage, and of course you could always add your own drives later on however doing so would void your warranty. 

The Mk.1 would slide in/out of its cage that would be installed in any DIN-E sized bay in your car.  The ability to physically remove the unit without much effort from your car was the easiest way to make sure that the Mk.1 could download the latest music from your home computer.

The Mk.1 unit itself featured both a 9-pin serial port and a 12Mbit USB port, which could be used to upload music onto the unit’s drive(s).  Unfortunately this left very few uploading options for those that weren’t running Windows 9x, and transferring gigabytes over a 115/230Kbps serial port isn’t the most efficient method of transferring data. 

The fact that the unit was running Linux attracted quite a bit of attention from the Linux community, however with no USB support at the time, empeg was essentially alienating the users of the OS they implemented into the Mk.1’s design.

Another issue that plagued the Mk.1 was the fact that it used floating grounds, something that is very uncommon in car audio.  These floating grounds help to eliminate a lot of noise generated by the unit by grounding the audio separately from the digital/chassis grounds, but as we mentioned before, they’re very rare in car audio equipment mainly because they tend to intensify any ground loops that already existed.  The use of floating grounds was just another quirk about the unit that kept it from being a truly commercial car stereo product. 

While the theory behind the product was definitely a sound one (no pun intended), the Mk.1 failed to become a widely used product for a variety of reasons.  Apparently the production yield on the units was quite low, making the Mk.1 very expensive to produce.  This combined with the starting price of approximately $1,100 USD for the 4GB model, and the fact that buyers had to wait an incredibly long time in order to purchase their players made the fact that Empeg, Ltd. only shipped 350 units seem very realistic.