[sendero]

Has anyone installed an Empeg/Rio Car player in their touareg? I have had one for years now and am not sure I can go back to simple Cd players. The Phatbox and IceLink/iPod options are interesting but require buying yet another MP3 player. I'd much rather be able to still use my empeg player and am hoping that someone else has installed one in their Touareg. If so, can you post any details/pics?

 

[sendero]

Their product is a DIN size hard disk MP3 player, but that is the very simple description of it. They have hard drives ranging from 10-60gb in them and run on a linux variant. They have some great searching ability and even have on-screen visualization when the music is playing. The device was way ahead of its time and over-priced for many people ($1600). Empeg was the company that created them. They were later bought out by Rio/Sonic Blue and eventually they discontinued the product. But when they did that they cleared out all the remaining stock at prices in the $200-500 range.

I was hoping that a Touareg owner might have done an install so I'd have something to go on but no luck so far. I found a thread last night on the empeg bbs regarding doing a remote display so I will probably end up with a glove-box mout and remote display on the steering wheel. Had the thought that it'd be really cool to be able to take over the MFI for the "now playing" info but I have a feeling that'd be near-impossible.