Car Audio

Old and Busted:New Warm-ness:My beloved old car stereo finally started acting up. The laser was becoming less and less aligned and skipping more and more. It was time to replace it. There were a few things that bothered me about the old one, mostly that it only displayed MP3 IDv1 tags and not the newer ones. But other than that it was pretty sweet. For the last few years though I've been coveting the next gen players that will play DVD-ROMs full of mp3's not just lame teeny tiny CD-ROMs.

This new player (JVC KD DV 7400) looked awesome, the extra $20 over lower models for a better display seemed worth it. But there's a few things that irk me about it.

• It takes 30 seconds to read a disk and start playing
• It re-reads the disk every time it powers up, and every time you switch between sources (press the volume button by mistake, which switches sources, and you're without music for 30 seconds).
• The USB-iPod connector works awesome with iPods, just plug in with the regular iPod cable and it controls it. However, your iPod must be a newer model, i.e. one that plays video. My iPod Photo just locks up when I plug it in. It also doesn't work with 1st or 2nd gen iPhones either (but at least it lets them work and does charge the battery)
  
• The USB disk reader is finicky, it won't read some parts of a disk If you defrag your disk it will play the first tracks, I've yet to find where the limit is. it won't play the whole of a 1G stick
  
• The display isn't as good a it could be, the track name is teeny and hard to read. There's so much screen real estate and they could have used it better.
• I get the impression random play is still random and not shuffle. At least I can choose between random in directory or over the whole disk.
  

However despite all that whining, I'm still happy with it and it's still an improvement on my old one, but there's still quite a bit they could do better with it. Now all I need to do is get some screens and I can play DVDs in the car!