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.
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.