Back in September or October 2001, one of the major electronics retailers decided to stop carrying the Turtle Beach AudioTron and put a huge discount on them, bringing the price to about $150. I was renting a room from Dale at the time and when he found out about the deal and told me, I asked him to pick up a second one for me.

The AudioTron is a network-enabled box about an inch high and the same width and depth as most audio gear that spiders every file share on the network for MP3 and WMV files. You can then select what you want to hear from the very simple front panel of the device or from a web page running on it and it will play over your stereo system through the RCA or Optical outputs.

Everybody has an iPod or three these days, but in 2001 this was completely awesome. There were other devices like this on the market, but most of them were locked down to specific software that had to sit on your Windows-enabled computer and spoon feed audio to the hardware device in your living room. Not the AudioTron. If there was a public share with MP3 files on your network, it would play them as it found them without complaint.

The AudioTron could also play Internet radio stations in MP3 or WMV format, but it had a catch. The only way to load a list of stations onto the device was to login to the turtleradio.com site and set up a profile for your device. Once you signed up on the website, you could select the radio stations that appealed to you. When you started up the AudioTron the next time, it would scan all the local file shares and then connect to the Turtle Radio directory server and download a list of the stations you were interested in.

I always thought this was a very odd way to go about this. Why not just let the user define their own radio stations directly on the AudioTron or at the very least in text files on the music shares? I also wondered what would happen when Turtle Beach finally decided to stop supporting or start charging for the use of the directory server. When I plugged it in today down in the basement for the first time in a few months, I found out.

Apparently Turtle Beach quietly classified the AudioTron as end-of-life in 2004, but continued to support the radio station directory server until a little after March of 2007. Having run the supporting site for three years after they stopped manufacturing or supporting the device was admirable all by itself, but Turtle Beach went a step further.

On one of their last firmware revisions before support ended, the programmers of the AudioTron added a hidden and passworded page that would allow the user to specify a local file for the radio station list instead of going to the default server over the network. This easter-egg page wasn't discussed on any of the firmware releases, and was passworded to prevent AudioTron owners from using it. But it existed.

At the beginning of this year, Turtle Beach released a technical bulletin instructing users how to configure the local file radio station list and released the password ("Godzilla") to the general public. While they strongly warned against doing a firmware update since it was out of support and you could turn your working MP3 stereo component into a doorstop if it went wrong, they left all the pieces available for folks who bought the device to keep using the full functionality.

I feel the need to share this story because we live in a world where our consumer products are increasingly crippled by Digital Restrictions Management that decide when you can and can't play music or watch a video or link a certain monitor to your graphics card. If the manufacturers were even a fraction as considerate as Turtle Beach to their customers, this might not be as big of a problem as it will inevitably be.

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