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While not officially labeled as such in the recent Crutchfield.com magazine, I think the following car stereos offer some good podcast listening options:
I purchased the JVC KD-G820 which has an upgraded screen as compared to the G720 but has the same USB port.
Two words: Stay away. The firmware in my unit is so buggy the clock doesn’t even work right! It stays on the same time indefinitely until you hit a button.
The reason I did buy this one is because of the USB port. I was coming from the Sony Hard Disk based radio I’ve had for several years now. The problem with that was it was extremely time consuming to get music on the unit. I would have to burn MP3s to audio CDs and then it would take 15 minutes for the unit to burn the audio CD to it’s hard drive. I loved the radio, it worked great. But after I started buying MP3’s instead of CDs, it lost it’s appeal.
So I picked up the JVC. I figured if it would work with a flash drive, then it should work with an external hard disk…and it does! The only problem is power…the port doesn’t have enough current to power the HD. But I have an enclosure that takes external power and it works great. Ok, well great might be an overstatement. It does work, I have my 7 gig of music, with the potential for 80 gig on the drive, and the head unit will play the songs. The issues:
Has to do a “file check” on bootup which takes about 30-40 seconds, so it won’t start playing music until it’s complete.
I have so many songs that if you try to view the list of folders, it takes so long to load the names that the display times out and switches back to the main screen before it displays any folder names. This probably wouldn’t be an issue if there were less songs. But this issue makes it impossible to look up and play a particular song. This is where the Sony really shined. Navigation was very fast and very easy.
On startup, the unit always starts playing from the middle of a semi random song (it seems to favor songs from a certain folder). It does not continue from the song that was playing when you turned the car off.
On the good side, the upgraded screen will display the song’s ID3 tag in quite a nice fashion. Name, album, and artist.
This comment is turning into a epinions article so I’ll stop now since I think you got the idea.
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I purchased the JVC KD-G820 which has an upgraded screen as compared to the G720 but has the same USB port.
Two words: Stay away. The firmware in my unit is so buggy the clock doesn’t even work right! It stays on the same time indefinitely until you hit a button.
The reason I did buy this one is because of the USB port. I was coming from the Sony Hard Disk based radio I’ve had for several years now. The problem with that was it was extremely time consuming to get music on the unit. I would have to burn MP3s to audio CDs and then it would take 15 minutes for the unit to burn the audio CD to it’s hard drive. I loved the radio, it worked great. But after I started buying MP3’s instead of CDs, it lost it’s appeal.
So I picked up the JVC. I figured if it would work with a flash drive, then it should work with an external hard disk…and it does! The only problem is power…the port doesn’t have enough current to power the HD. But I have an enclosure that takes external power and it works great. Ok, well great might be an overstatement. It does work, I have my 7 gig of music, with the potential for 80 gig on the drive, and the head unit will play the songs. The issues:
Has to do a “file check” on bootup which takes about 30-40 seconds, so it won’t start playing music until it’s complete.
I have so many songs that if you try to view the list of folders, it takes so long to load the names that the display times out and switches back to the main screen before it displays any folder names. This probably wouldn’t be an issue if there were less songs. But this issue makes it impossible to look up and play a particular song. This is where the Sony really shined. Navigation was very fast and very easy.
On startup, the unit always starts playing from the middle of a semi random song (it seems to favor songs from a certain folder). It does not continue from the song that was playing when you turned the car off.
On the good side, the upgraded screen will display the song’s ID3 tag in quite a nice fashion. Name, album, and artist.
This comment is turning into a epinions article so I’ll stop now since I think you got the idea.
LikeLike
I about choked on this because my mind translated ‘podcast ready car stereos’ into in-dash decks with microphones.
“I can record through my deck while DRIVING?!?! WOOOO”
Heh, someday, perhaps.
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I about choked on this because my mind translated ‘podcast ready car stereos’ into in-dash decks with microphones.
“I can record through my deck while DRIVING?!?! WOOOO”
Heh, someday, perhaps.
LikeLike
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