SONICBLUE files for Bankruptcy....!

[gsaldivar]

Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

Text

 

[Justorq]

What's gonna happen with all of the Rio's out there..
That sux tho ...
Who's owned by SonicBlue?

 

[AmdInside]

What's gonna happen to my ReplayTV

 

[Megatomic]

I've been unhappy with them (well, Diamond MM actually) since they left me in a lurch shortly after I purchased a Diamond MX-400 soundcard. It wasn't even a dated product when they jumped ships and stopped making/supporting sound/video/modem cards.

In summary, let them rot.

 

[0roo0roo]

yup, diamondmm left many of us in a lurch.


sonic blues only decent product was their cdmp3 player. no proprietary memory.

their other rios still sucked, memory packs u have to buy from them and get gouged for? bah!

 

[Slogun]

Yea, I just read about that.
It reminds me of a year or two ago when sonicblue bought SensoryScience, the maker of my MP3 player. Support and firmware updates were no longer available.

 

[CaptainSpectacular]

ReplayTV & Rio are going to D&M products, which is the company that formed when Denon & Marantz merged last year. i think this is a great thing for replay because Denon/Marantz have better name recognition and likely a much better idea of what to do with a compnay like ReplayTV/Rio

 

[Remedy]

Who's owned by SonicBlue?

Former S3 owners had them until VIA picked them up. Sonic came after and took DMM along with them and DMM had Fire GL team. Then ATi picked up Fire GL team for a nice profit. That was the first of Sonics problems.

 

[psy44]

well I hate the Rio 600 so, I am kinda happy. They should've never made those stupid overpriced rio backpack memory things.

 

[Adul]

clutches his rio player

 

[jeffrey]

This has been a loooooong time coming!

 

[AndyHui]

SonicBlue were actually S3. Not really Diamond.

Diamond bought Orchid (video cards) and Micronics (motherboards). Eventually S3 bought them, as well as Number 9 (best known for their 128-bit 2D cards back in the day).

Diamond became the graphics division of S3, which was eventually sold off to VIA.

 

[Auric]

S3 didn't buy Number 9 but aquired some of their assets as they were going into bankruptcy (much the same as Nvidia did 3dfx) and assumed some of their contracts such as for S3 based video cards to IBM.

S3's graphics division was aquired by VIA as a joint venture so as to maintain S3's important licensing agreements with Intel (which came about due to S3's aquisition of Exponential patents). This funded the birth of SonicBLUE.

No suprise to me they failed as MP3 stuff went from a specialty product to a mainstream feature in every manufacturer's gear.

 

[ViRGE]

Originally posted by: AndyHui
SonicBlue were actually S3. Not really Diamond.

Diamond bought Orchid (video cards) and Micronics (motherboards). Eventually S3 bought them, as well as Number 9 (best known for their 128-bit 2D cards back in the day).

Diamond became the graphics division of S3, which was eventually sold off to VIA.

This isn't nessisarily true. Diamond was more than just a video card maker; they had a sound card buisness, an optical drive buisness(the DVD-ROM, MPEG2 decoder card combos, ala the Creative DXR sets), a modem buisness, a motherboard buisness, a SCSI card buisness(the Fireports were damn good cards too), a MP3 player buisness, and they even sold a mouse. When the leech called S3 rolled in, a lot of Diamon was killed, but not all of it, and the remaining divisions more or less stayed like they were. The sound card division was killed after the MX400, the SCSI card buisness was killed some time ago(I don't know why, Diamond had the Fireport 80 ready to go), the optical drive division was killed off due to competition from Creative(it never took off), the motherboard buisness was never "killed" they just didn't ever do anything with it, the mouse sucked, and of course, the graphics division was spun off(in a sense, both the video card division of Diamond, and S3's own core product were spun off, leaving us with Diamond Reincarnate).

The leaves us to the present day, where the modem and Rio buisnessses are still going. The modem buisness is just that: a modem buisness, and doesn't really have much more of a life in it now that modem innovation is basically dead. The Rio buisness is struggling, but it's still doing well(which is a good thing, Diamond won one of the most important court cases in history in going against the RIAA to lauch the Rio). Diamond's biggest products were its video cards, and indeed they lost a good deal of their "soul" when the graphics division was spun off, but in bits and bytes, they have been limping along right up to this day.

 

[Baileybbk]

I also love my ReplayTV but was never happy with the company (major quality problems).
I'm glad TiVo is there because I believe in competition, although I've found the TiVo to be lacking.

I'll be very happy if Denon really has bought the product!

 

[eplebnista]

 

[Banana]

So what's the status? I got a spam mail from Rio today advertising their online store. I wonder if D&M Holdings will continue to support Rio & ReplayTV with updates and warranty . . .

 

[Leon]

2 bancrupcies in a row for Greg Ballard. 3dfx and now SBlue. Poor guy :sun: