car stereo choice (1 Viewer)

[euclid]

Any of the regulars in here stereo guys also? I'm ready to replace the eclipse deck in my truck. It's not reliable on CD playback any more. I've sent it in once for warranty repair. It's just time to move on...

I'd love some suggestions as far as picking my next deck.

Here's what is important to me in order of priority:

• Durability - - IE: dust and vibration resistance
• VERY clean and strong (at least 2) pre-amp outputs. I won't be using the internal amp. I have a sub amp and a 4 way amp for my speakers.
• satalite radio integrated
• aux input. I don't like to navigate my ipod on screen.
• looks like it belongs in an 89 landcruiser not a lancer evo. Green dash color option is a bonus
• single din. I like my dash pocket

Sub $300 would be great, but would go $400 for the right deck. This $600 eclipse deck didn't hold up to the vibration and dust. I'm wondering if that's not true of lots of the finer decks.

 

[esh]

GT- You've seen my posts over on the 60s forum. Here's my research for a head unit.

I don't know about dust and vibration, but I went with the previous gen JVC-AVX33 something or other. The new one, the 44, is all touch-based, which I thought might be a bad idea while driving (you have to look at it). Mine was new/unopened and has the same specs as the new model except for a tactile front panel.

It was that or the Alpine media player. JVC won because it integrated bluetooth, had more ins/outs (options), and still had a CD/DVD player. I would have had to add bluetooth for $$ for the Alpine, and no CDs. The only drawback is Alpine uses the Burr-brown DAC so it should sound better in theory. JVC has a bigger screen, and I want to try and mount a helmetcam somewhere around the front axle for spotting.

Here's what I've found-

- for large mp3 collections, nothing works well. If you have more than say 10GB or so, indexing those files will take a long time if the head unit controls the process. car stereo hasn't caught up with modern storage capacity processing yet. I bought a used 5.5gen Ipod, yanked the 80G drive, bought the compact flash adapter from the UK, swapped in the circuit board and a 32G CF card, and installed RockBox (better firmware, lets me add a theme that is good for road visibility, super flexible).
- sat radio (two boxes) is about $100 from amazon
- aux adapter is about $15 from ebay
- comes with a USB connector
- function over form.. this thing looks modern but it works how I want.

I'm also adding some decent amplification, speakers, sub, and eq.. so SQ was my primary goal, and features came as I could fit them in.

 

[steverb]

jvc put mine threw tons of abuse and mine even takes sd cards so there's no skipping on the roughest of trails. my tops off for 3 1/4 of the year and lots of dirt road driving so lots of dust. i run 2 PHOENIX GOLD 500, 700 watt amps with cliff design mids tweeters crossovers, and an adioban 10in sub.