Car Stereo recommendations?
 

I'm looking to bring my wife's car into the 1990's this Christmas, by having a CD player installed in it. I am anything but an audiophile (tapes and cassettes sound about the same to me), and likewise for my wife, so I'm looking for a decent blend of brand-name, function and price without going totally high-end.

I'm looking hard at the Sony CDX-MP30 right now. It's around $200, is XM-ready (should I decide that that's a viable option later on), and can play CDRs full of MP3s, which made my eyes bug out at that price. Ten-hour mix CDs on the road! Woohoo.

Any other recommendations or warnings?

I love these things, personally. I just got a Kenwood car stereo mp3-cd player for christmas from my wife.

The only bad thing about these mp3-cd players that i've found is that most players only support 8.3 character filenames. All of my mp3's filenames I burn begin with the bands name, and player sorts files in alphabetical order. The net result of this is that all of your albums will be played in reverse order. The way to avoid this, I think, is to put a number at the beginning of all the filenames so that it doesn't get truncated. I usually just live with having it on random, though, as it would probably take months to go back and fix my 40+ mp3-cds.

I personally would stay away from Sony, you pay alot for the name. And their decks always feel like they are going to break easily to me. I'd go with Kenwood, Pioneer, or JVC. Kenwood and Pioneer are going to have more XM compatibility, though I really like JVC's decks. I'd do some looking for you, but I got to go study.

juju, does your MP3 player randomize within directories or across the entire CD. I have a JVC and it goes across the entire cd, and I know kenwoods first few MP3 decks could just randomize within directories. I wish mine had an opton for both.

www.crutchfield.com

I have bought three items from Crutchfield and their process is perfect in every way. Their web site works perfectly. The install instructions that come with the units make it simple to do your own handiwork, saving a ton of money.

The latest buy was exactly what you're looking for: a $200 MP3 unit, and I bought the Clarion that Crutchfield has the special on right now. I am generally happy with it although once in a while it seems to "lose its place" in a folder of MP3s. This is rare though (so far). I installed it myself even though it wasn't listed as an "EZ" install.

In the case of my veedub that means I have to take the entire dash apart, but the instructions list everything you have to do, and I did it and am overly pleased with myself as a result. They do suggest you solder a connector together yourself to match up the output from the unit with your car's input thingie. I am handy enough with a soldering iron and the soldering needed for this is the most simple and basic kind. Plus, you don't have to do that part while sittin gin the car.

I did not buy the Sony, because I had a Sony head in this car from 95-98, and I grew to hate that thing, and vowed never to buy another Sony automotive product.

The Clarion seems to read the MP3 folders fast enough - it's only like 4-5 seconds between turning the thing on and having it start to play the first track, and that's fine. When it loses its place, which it has done 3 times on 2 different discs, it won't play anything in that folder and moves on to the next folder. This is a better failure mode than, say, shutting down entirely. Every time it has done it I have just ejected the CD and reinserted it, and it finds the folder and plays it. There may be a simpler workaround that I haven't found yet.

The thing is laid out well enough. It doesn't have a remote but its most important controls are on the driver side, and you can work out which button to hit easily enough.

The only thing it doesn't have, that I would like, is an input jack on the front of the unit. The cheaper ones don't generally have that.

Everyone replied while I was writing that. Misc:

The Clarion does support long filenames and scrolls the name as it plays the file. Which is what you want.

I have a CD ripper that will assign track numbers as the first item of the filename. So I've settled on a format for containing everything I rip. If I rip and convert Ivy's "Guestroom", for example, I wind up with a folder and sub-folder:

\Ivy
--\Guestroom
-----\01-Let's Go To Bed.MP3
-----\02-Kite.MP3
-----\03-Say Goodbye.MP3

etc. That way, the albums stay together and in order, and I can select by album to burn MP3 disks. The filename doesn't contain the artist, but I generally know the artist and don't need that to be part of the scrolling filename in the car.

Also, I've kinda settled on a bit rate of 160. I guess I should use that VBR but I wanted to know that I was ripping in a format that any player could play. I don't know if all players can play VBR MP3s. I do know that my flash player can't handle low bitrates.

I started ripping at 192, but the file sizes were large enough to limit a single CD of MP3s to about 5 albums, and that's not enough. I doubt I could tell the difference at even 128 in the car, which is not the ideal listening room to start with, but you never know where these files will be used.

I can second the Crutchfield nomination. Whatever you buy, buy it from there. It may be a little more, but their process makes it painless. Their emphasis is on customer service, and it shows.

It seems to randomize within directories. If I want a mix cd, I just put it all in one big directory.

I used to be a crutchfield fan until I found my deck online for about 75 dollars less, cruchfield's support though rocks, and there install kits are great. If you plan on installing it yourself and don't have a lot of experience go with crutchfield.

Therein lies the rub. When it comes to actual physical tinkering, I barely know which end of the screwdriver to hold, and will need to rely on a brick-and-mortar store's installers.

What make of car does you wife have, it's a Ford make the installation is a breeze with the kit that crutchfield has. I've never dealt with other makes but with the documentaiton that cruchfield provides I'm sure you could figure it out.

If you are going to have a dealer install you'll probably end up buying the deck from them, but I would check online, you might end up saving a few bucks, just make sure you know the installation price of the dealer your going to use.

She drives a Ford Contour, and I'm blanking on the year. Relatively recent. It has basic factory-installed tape-deck audio at present.

Seriously, my installation plan is something like "Hello, [Best Buy/Circuit City/Sears/other common purveyor of car audio] salesman. I am purchasing this CD deck; here is the car it goes in. Let me know when to pick it up tonight." I hear phrases like "take the dash apart" and would be more comfortable taking my own appendix out with salad tongs.

(And, yes, I'm the sort who laughs at those who buy computers from Best Buy, Circuit City, Sears et al, so I probably shouldn't be buying car audio there... but unlike the computer world, I am a rank amateur here. I did look in my local Tweeter yesterday, but most of their available decks were quite high-end.)

I'm telling you you could easily do the installation if it's a ford. It's just a matter of yanking the deck out and sliding the new deck in. Fords come with DIN sized openings you shouldn't have to do any modifications and crutchfield sends you the tools and harness to install the deck. I did my first install using cruchfields guide and had no problems, I learned enough actually that I did my second one by myself.

Words to live by: Best Buy will fuck you over. Any price they quote to you will inevitably be upped by 25 to 50 percent when you get to the register.

ive had good luck with circuit city. i agree with juju. best buy sucks.

~james

I'm not a big Best Buy guy, unless I'm buying simple retail goods. Their customer service is notoriously bad. (On the plus side, the local one is in Delaware -- no taxes -- and they're the only ones I've found who have the Sony deck I mentioned in stock at $219.)

Circuit City... well, if I could GET to one of their stores, they might be an option. Whoever chose the store locations and/or designed their sites locally was a crack-fed lunatic.

Of the three nearest my apartment, #1 is near Valley Forge, and while it has decent parking, you have to deal with nasty 202 traffic and jockey for position on Swedesford Road just to get near the place. #2 is in Springfield -- which says enough right there. (Springfield's civil engineers designed the local highway layout during an all-night peyote binge.)

#3 is in Wilmington, DE, right down the street from the Best Buy, and it would be my preferred location IF I could actually _park_ there. The lot is incredibly small for a retail store and fills up in 3 1/2 seconds; I've had to bail out of shopping trips there and go elsewhere in NORMAL times after circling the lot for fifteen minutes. During the Xmas rush? Forget it. It'd be like an Eagles game where only a couple dozen parking places were available.

Apart from Best Buy, Tweeter, Circuit City and perhaps Sears, I'm not sure where else to look here in suburban Philly...

You'd better be right -- I just ordered one. (It was roughly comparable to the Sony, though it didn't have XM-compatibility (which I won't shed a tear over) or a remote.) Their return policy seems fair enough, so now I'll have 30 days to figure out how to install the damn thing. ;)

(I entered Wendy's 1996 Ford Contour on the web site and it seems to think it'll be quite compatible and an easy install, but they haven't met me yet.)

Trust me, you'll do fine, and if you have problems call them, they are excellent at helping you out.

The one time I attempted a car stereo install (with the help of an extremely kind friend) I misunderstood the words "minor dashboard modifications" in the applications guide.

The "minor" modifications involved several large, frightening power tools and about 10 hours. Luckily the "rustic" installation gave my 1980 Datsun 210 additional "character". So did the fake switches I had installed on the dash labelled "hood mounted machine guns" and "warp drive."

Since that time I've either left well enough alone, or paid a profesional (nice fellow by the name of Jesus who was on work release for boosting stereos. He was at least as good at putting them in as he was at taking them out) to do it.

Wolf are you trying to give the guy a heartattack. There should be no dashboard modification of the Contour as long as it follows the same standards as other Ford vehicles.

According to what I'm reading, dashboard modification -- no. Soldering required on the adaptor -- yes. I'll call around locally and see who wants to tackle the project.

Thanks for the recommendation ut. I'm going to have to take a good look at that Clarion.

I'm installing it in my wife's car this afternoon. vsp, if you don't find anyone else to do the work, you can PM me and drive up here. It's just past Phoenixville on 113.

And I just now realized that if anyone does order it, and you put in a referral code of p1rd7-tjz80-e3yyu , you will get $20 off and *I* will get $20 off my next order.

It's in. (A local auto-detailing place put it in for $50.) I'm in the process of experimenting with the best formats for our MP3 CDs.

About the only thing I'm finding myself wishing this could do would be root-level Random Play for MP3s (i.e. one-button random track selection over all folders, not just within the current one). This means that if I want a mix CD, I have to put everything in one folder, so I may end up creating one-folder and multiple-folder discs for the same tracks. But hell, CDRs are dirt cheap these days...

Interestingly, the deck I received doesn't precisely match either Crutchfield's catalog entry for it (the catalog says it has a wireless remote) OR the deck's own manual (the faceplate shows features, such as PTY, that are not pictured in the manual). Perhaps there's more behind the price drop than meets the eye... but it's here and it works and that's good enough for me.

There's no remote, but PTY?

Does it say DB625MP on the front?

As far as I remember. (It's at home right now, I'm not.)

Here's the difference -- look just above the dot-matrix readout. The pictures I've seen all have two icons above it -- "ST" for Stereo and "MUTE" for muting. Well, mine has four more dimmed icons to the right of MUTE, one of which was PTY. Does yours? I have no idea if the deck itself HAS PTY features, or how to enable them if it does. Apart from that, it's identical to the manual -- it's not as if there's a different Clarion deck with a similar faceplate that they might've swapped in by accident.

(The only reason it stuck out when I saw it was that my father just bought a new Chevy Trailblazer, and I was helping him decipher HIS new radio's features when I tried out PTY. On his, I can enter a type of FM station to search for (such as "Rock") and it'll automagically scan to stations that broadcast self-identifiers matching my criteria.)

The remote was not shipped, as they say, on purpose. When I compared the Sony deck I'd mentioned to the Clarion on Crutchfield's site, they specified it directly -- Clarion == no remote, Sony == remote. It's not as if it's a big loss, however.

Damn, you're right! The dimmed items are NEWS, AF, PTY, and TA and I don't believe I've ever seen any of them lit up.

In fact every illustration in the manual blatantly ignores these items as if they didn't exist. I'm going to guess these were planned for some higher model.

What I learned yesterday, that I didn't realize before: using the "DISP" button, while playing back MP3, you can *specify* whether the scrolling display shows the file name, folder name, title, disc name, etc.

From a first glance it looks like the "title" setting gets its information from the ID3 tag. This makes it more important to use a ripping program that fills in that information.

When I started ripping I was using cdex, which is supposed to rip CDs with a tremendous level of accuracy before converting them to mp3. But cdex didn't store files using the filenames I wanted, and often errored out for seemingly no reason. And I don't think it fills in the ID tag. Also, with cdex I had one mp3 conversion that seemed to go wrong and resulted in a burst of terrible noise. Exactly the kind of noise you don't want while driving down the road at high speeds: ugly digital noise at twice the volume of the song.

So I searched out the shareware offerings and found one that has been doing the job. It's "AltoMP3 Maker". It will rip the first 12 tracks of any disc without registration, but I registered it (at $19.95) because it was easy and does exactly what I want. If there are accuracy problems I can't detect any.

Also, it uses the Lame mp3 encoder, which is supposed to be the best.

I mention all this stuff just in case anyone finds it useful.

At the risk of sending this thread into a "my mp3 encoder is better than yours" war, I'm going to recommend an encoder: Exact Audio Copy. It automagically rips from cds that are scratched beyond recognition. I've had it get (near) perfect rips from cds that I can't even play in a regular cd player. It's free, and allows the use of any external encoding software. I use lame aps, but that's just me.

How's it going with this? Are you happy? I have not mentioned that I bought the same deal for my wife for Xmas, and installed it the day after into her Altima. It did require the soldering, and it did require the removal of some plastic bits of the car. But it went well.

All of the problems I've had with it have been related to the ripping/encoding process and not the Clarion itself.

Cool thing: Memorex has these "cool colors" CDR blanks. I figured what the hell and bought them. It turns out that they have colored the dye used in the CDR processing so that now just about any color is possible. Now the really cool thing, which I did not expect: one of the colors is black.

You turn over the CD and instead of seeing shiny aluminum CD surface, or the shiny aluminum CD surface through a layer of light blue or light orange, all it looks like is a BLACK disk.

Oh for all the.... wait a sec, let me get the camera.

http://cellar.org/2003/memorexdisks.jpg

You see, the red disks are red underneath, and the blue disks are blue underneath, and the BLACK disks... are BLACK underneath, which is unexpected!

But I burned one, and it played OK in the player, so...

Actually when you look at the right angle, you see that it's really a very, very, very dark red. That's what the little red diagonal line is on the image there... a reflection from the aluminum layer, only the camera picks it up very well.

PlayStation discs have been black-bottomed for years now, and I've seen similar black-bottomed CDRs at Best Buy and elsewhere.

I'd be interested in experimenting with those, as I have specific-dye-color needs for certain pursuits. (Verbatim's dark-blue discs are the absolute best for backing up my PlayStation imports, while Fuji's pale-blue dye discs are the only ones that will work when burned as VCDs in my Sony DVD player. I keep "generic" gold-backed discs around for other purposes.)