To the manufacturers of car audio equipment:
To Who It May Concern,
I currently have a Clarion CD head unit that has served me well for nearly five years. Super clean pro-audio sound, ergonomic and looks good in the dash. But, it is now getting past its prime. The oversampling seems to have gone away as it’ll skip even while my truck is standing still and some of the lights behind the buttons don’t work anymore.
It is time for me to get a new one and I have a budget of $400.
I am looking around for a new deck on all the websites I can, but I am not seeing anything I didn’t see there five years ago. Are you aware that new technology has emerged since then? Most notably, MP3 players are quite popular, yet I still have to buy an FM broadcasting accessory for the player because you guys won’t adapt.
How about a jack in the front of the deck so that I can mate my MP3 player to your head unit? Hell, it can even be a 1394 plug, I don’t care.
Or how about a USB jack that I can plug my thumbdrive into?
This is car audio, not rocket science, ladies and gentlemen!
Hell, you can even just integrate the jack into your CD changers. I’ll put it under my driver’s seat and just jack in and out at will, just like I already do with my multiple CD magazines.
Your current crop of equipment can read up to 200 songs on a single CD and I can label up to 100 CDs so that your players will recognize them individually. What would be so hard about what I’m asking?
C’mon folks, this is 2005 here! Get with it!
Yours by necessity,
AK
Look at brands aimed at the Euro market, preferably ones that are NOT marketed here. The euros tend to be more practical about these things.
The solution is as close as your laptop, BTW. On long road trips, I use the laptop to navigate with AND play the several gigs of music I have on there. It would be easy enough to take a lead from the laptop’s sound card output into the amplifier in your car stereo suite.
Uhh, yea, Euro DIN sizes are somewhat different. I’m actually looking in Japan right now. Screw the Euros, they can’t even encode a DVD properly.
As for my laptop, umm, no. If I wanted to hardwire something to my amp, I’d just as soon do that with my MP3 player.
I want this for everyday, I’ve got a changer for long drives – Six disks + 200 songs each = 1200 songs. I just want to be able to do that without the spinning and the possibility of the skipping when a disk gets the smallest scratch on it.
MP3’s and the like are the new, and I might say, dominant, technology and all the car audio folks can do is think about spinning disks and act like they are the shiznit when I toss a disk a day due to wear and tear.
Nope, not going to wait much longer. Pretty soon, I’ll just flat face my DIN panel and dash mount my MP3 player, hardwire the power to it and hardwire it to my amp.
Talk about a theft-proof detachable stereo.