Open Letter: Redux

Yesterday, I went a little off at the car audio industry for no other reason than that I had a wild hair. But now that I’m over it, you could say that I scored!

If you would like to have a car audio deck that will read your MP3 player without one of those truly inadequate FM transmitters or that you can stuff a thumbdrive into, the follow the links and choose your deck.

First up though, the only thing along the lines of what I want that I could find before I wrote my open letter. If you don’t mind buying a new Kenwood head unit and hooking this thing they call ‘The Keg’ into it, you can have your digital music stored on media cards.

I started off in the South China Sea and the Sea of Japan, seeing as how those folks don’t seem to suffer from rectal-cranial impaction when it comes to electronics. These first few not only read from a USB, but also SD cards, plentiful and relatively cheap.

I immediately found this bad boy in Korea. Too bad I think it is ugly.

I found it over and over again at all the on-line electronics shops over there and I wondered if it was the only one! Seeing as how my Korean is nonexistent and my Japanese is pathetic (along with me refusing to convert yen to dollars unless I’m in-country), I took another tack.

And found this one, which is even uglier.

This one is better looking, but the button is on the wrong side for us left-hand drive vehicle owners.

And then I found what I thought was ‘The One’ (the upper one)

But it ends up that that website is a wholesaler and wants me to buy something like 500 of them. I’d like to take them up on that as I’m sure I could sell them, but my investment capital is a bit low at this time.

So I kept looking.

Moved on over to Euroland, even though their car deck areas are sized weird, I figure that as long as the deck is smaller than what I have now, I can make it fit.

And I find this. Again, ugly.

I also found this one, which is not only ugly in a different sort of way, but seems to be unreliable.

Then, once again, I thought I found ‘The One’

The deck design is perfect and it has all the pre-outs, etc. that I want in my deck.

I got a nice email back this morning from Audry at Dr. Gadget UK thanking me for my interest but that they are not allowed to ship them to the US for any reason whatsoever, including money.

I’m trying to figure out a nice way to tell Audry that she should really send me the email addy to the people who made that rule so that I can tell them what I think of their heritage, but I haven’t gotten around to calming that far down yet.

I almost gave up and just wanted to bang my head on the desk because it will either be an ugly car deck or no car deck and I didn’t like those two choices when I somehow clicked into some sort of a back door to Best Buy. Which is 5 miles away from me.

Sometimes, what you’re looking for is right in front of you, you just need to come at it from another angle. I was there yesterday and the day before looking around for exactly this, but I swear it wasn’t there.

While it is by no means perfect in the realm of looks, it is not a bad looking deck and it has my necessary pre-outs, plus if I get tired of it, I’ll swap it into the wife’s car and get a different one.

They do not have one in stock and the person I spoke to had never heard of such a thing, so I had them order it. I’ll check back with them in a week if they haven’t called me to say it is in by then, and we’ll see how it goes from there.

This is going to be the next big thing in car audio. I have no doubt that we’ll see USB ports on most of the new decks out there in six to twelve months. Why do I think this, because I’ve heard that Toyota’s new line, the Scion, is entering the states with a USB port already built into the car, next to the power socket.

Ingenious!