I bought this to replace an alpine deck I had so that I could use a flash drive or mp3 in my car. The sound difference between the two was small, but I feel like my older alpine deck had a little better sound.
Overall, the sound is good. Bass is alright.
The display is easy to read unless you are in really bright sunlight.
The seek button on the radio is really fast. Going from one station to the next there is hardly any delay at all which is awesome.
As someone else pointed out the button display is a little frustrating. The source button is directly next to the seek button so you will often hit source (from aux to radio to cd ect.) when you meant to hit next song or station.
I can't figure out how to turn of 3 beeps that happen when you turn of the car either. A minor annoyance, but an annoyance nonetheless.
My biggest gripe is the random song selection. I have 18gb's of music on my computer. I carefully went through it made a list for a 4gb flash drive which took a long time. I plugged in the flash drive and the music comes on flawlessly. But then I heard a song within the first hour that I had already heard. 4gbs fits about 1,000 songs. And then it happened again. I called sony and they told me that the random on the device does not stop playing songs it already played. In other words the random selection can play the same songs over and over again, rather than properly making one long random list that doesn't play a song again until the whole list plays through. The amount of time it does this is quite frustrating.
Further, the device only recognizes 128 folders on a device. When I synced my music onto the flash drive through windows media player, it creates folders for every single artist. I chose over 128 artists so it won't even play some of the music on my device. That is REALLY frustrating because other than dragging and dropping each mp3 on the device there is no way to avoid this.
I am planning on getting the new iphone and running it through the aux, so hopefully I won't have to worry about either of these features as the IPHONE should not have these two problems.
Conclusion-
A good stereo that will play your cds and mp3s, but if you have a ton of music I would look elsewhere. The random feature and 128 folder limit are ridiculously poor design.
I paid $100 for it and $50 for installation so I am sticking with it for now, but I would probably replace it if I could.
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