CD Players

I took a different approach for sound, you may like this. First off, it seems like if I buy a CD, there are only one or 2 songs I like. I have downloaded 5000 songs onto my hardrive. I bought an Archos 15 gig jukbox recorder. I velcro attach it to my delete playe, and plug it in to my 100 watt amp strapped to the battery and let it play through 4 inch door speakers. I can create my onw playlists and store 5000 songs. It is like an Ipod I guess. It is simple to drag and drop songs into it. 16 hours on a charge. I have been scouting for a voltage regulator to attach 9.5 to the unit. For a cd...I think a Chevy Citation has the vertical mount like the Pantera. How about a 10 disc changer up front remote control..

Todd Reid, Pantera owner extraodrinaire, owns a car audio store. He rocommended an Eclipse unit that is working just fine in my car.

As a side note, I mounted it under the radio delete plate.

Jeff
6559

Help!!! I can't figure out how to post pictures in the proper size to the board? My picture (which included the 2 views) s/h/b about 5x7 and was only 248 kb.

Thanks.

Jeff
6559

This JVC receiver (Model CH-PK12) with 12-CD changer in the trunk works great for me. No problem in the 4 years since installation. If I was shopping today, I'd most likely look for a reciever with MP3 capability in addition to CDs.

Ron

One of these days I'm going to purchase an iPod & cigarette lighter adapter and just play it through the oem Blaupunkt system (via FM radio). The only reason I haven't done that yet is the cigarette lighter doesn't work, one of those yet to be accomplished little projects.

Due to the iPod & high capacity solid state memory devices, the nature of car audio is about to "morph" again, I'm holding off purchasing anything expensive until the dust settles. The CD is pretty much history, like the 4 track tape, 8 track tape and cassette.

If I had to make a purchase now, I would be looking at iPod controllers.

your prophetic friend on the PIBB, George

When my daughter was visiting resently, and riding in the Pantera for the first time, she brought along her ipod with a cassette adaptor. My car has an old Realistic am/fm cassette radio with some kind of overhead speaker system, that may have been sold by one of the vendors in the past. The radio normally sounds terrrible, but when she hook up the ipod, wow! what a difference! I'm so old I remember when 4 tracks were cool!

Go for the Ipod system! with the radio tune in frequency, you will never look back...
I have a ten stacker Kenwood system which works great , but got to get with the times.
The BIG PLUS is when you get rid off the stacker in the front think of all the room you will have!!!
Maybe even enough room for a spare tyre....
Dennis

Thanks for all the input I have been trying to decide what to install to use for music on long trips. The Ipod idea had crossed my mind, I just got the car back together and got the new interior back in I hated to start cut holes in it until I knew what I wanted to do for sound. When I had the dash and console recovered along with every thing else I had the holes for the radio covered over along with cigarette lighter hole. I’m thinking now maybe I’ll leave it that way and put in an amp to connect to the speakers with a plug-in under dash that I can just plug an Ipod into or CD walkman if I want.

quote:

Originally posted by 1972RG:
with a plug-in under dash .

They make hidden receivers that have IR or other RF ways to operate.

Jeff
6559

jeff6559 thanks, I did not even think about using a IR or other RF way of operating.

do a search on secret audio on the web, its a am-fm 10 disc cd player system. you keep the original stereo in, this unit mounts under the seat or under the dash, the cd player can mount horizontal or vertical in the front trunk. the system has an remote control, system costs about 479.00 complete, has stealth optional speakers.

I'm really amazed how much mp3 players have caught on. And while I like to play them for casual listening, they will NEVER replace my CD player. Simply put, mp3's are an inferior music source. They will NEVER create the sound as good as the source it was ripped from. Don't even argue this point, it's a fact.

On RF transmission, like the iPod's...those too are horrible. You're taking an mp3, which is bad enough alread, then further degrading it through RF. Again, junk.

Matt,

the key phrase in your post is "casual listening". That's all we can do in a moving vehicle, especially a noisy moving vehicle like a Pantera. Auto sound is background music, like in an elevator! My fave is Dick Dale! King of the surf guitar.

Like it or not, the CD is on the way out as the dominant portable music source for automobiles. Some form of compressed music data system will be the next "thing". I just saw a 2 gig SD memory chip for a digital camera at Circuit City the other day. Solid state. Less than $100. That would store a lot of compressed music. Not much bigger than a postage stamp.

I'm not throwing away my CD library either. The realities of home listening & listening in the car are 2 different things however.

The most sensitive ear, trained for critical music listening, could not reliably distinguish the difference in music sources between a CD player & an RF iPod in a moving Pantera, listening to the music reproduced by the speakers found in the average Patera, located in the less than ideal locations Pantera owners are forced to make do with. This is assuming the test is an A/B double blind test conducted at listening levels matched to within +/- 0.2 db.

You obviously enjoy critical music listening. I'll bet you consider it a hobby and that your home sound system is at least 10 times the price of the average persons. To the average listener, compressed music data systems sound no different than non compressed sources.

Matt, I understand your concerns, I am a former associate of the Audio Engineering Society, owned a set of Quads before the kids came along.

your friend on the DTBB, George

quote:

Originally posted by woodbine:
do a search on secret audio on the web, its a am-fm 10 disc cd player system. you keep the original stereo in, this unit mounts under the seat or under the dash, the cd player can mount horizontal or vertical in the front trunk. the system has an remote control, system costs about 479.00 complete, has stealth optional speakers.

This is a pretty good option. Seen it some time ago but had forgotten about it. Kinda pricey though.

quote:

Originally posted by woodbine:
do a search on secret audio on the web, its a am-fm 10 disc cd player system. you keep the original stereo in, this unit mounts under the seat or under the dash, the cd player can mount horizontal or vertical in the front trunk. the system has an remote control, system costs about 479.00 complete, has stealth optional speakers.

Check some good car audio stores. There are others out there, including ones that do not have CD players so you can just use your IPOD (when you get it.) The other reason this is an interesting option is that you can keep the rare radio delete plate in your car.

Jeff
6559

I am using the Dell mp3 player. Small, 20 gig. I got a $20 transmitter (says ipod) from target. Transmits to any FM station. I have 850 songs on it with enough room for another 2500+ songs. Simple, and works great.

In my truck I also use a cd player that plays MP3's. That's not to bad. You can put 11+ albums on CD. Burn one, listen to it for a while, pitch it, burn another.

I have about 150 cd's. I am not a big CD buyer. I used to buy a few and get them ocasionally for xmas. I transfered all of them to MP3. Now I just move them where I want to from there. I have never downloaded anything online.

When they started making cd's so you could not copy them on computer, WHILE at the same time, they began an AUTOMATIC AOL instilation, it pissed me off so bad I have never bought another cd since. That was several years ago.

Gary

quote:

Originally posted by george pence:

The most sensitive ear, trained for critical music listening, could not reliably distinguish the difference in music sources between a CD player & an RF iPod in a moving Pantera

I suppose this is true enough for a Pantera. But the popularity of mp3 players goes well beyond a Pantera.

quote:

You obviously enjoy critical music listening. I'll bet you consider it a hobby and that your home sound system is at least 10 times the price of the average persons. To the average listener, compressed music data systems sound no different than non compressed sources.

No, I don't have big expensive stereo system (too busy spending money on the Pantera itself), but I would if I could. I'm probalby more critical than the average user, but wouldn't call myself a critical listener. However, give me a track on compressed music vs the same track of non-compressed, and I can tell the difference. The dynamic range is much broader, no comparrison.

quote:

Originally posted by comp2:
I am using the Dell mp3 player. Small, 20 gig. I got a $20 transmitter (says ipod) from target. Transmits to any FM station. I have 850 songs on it with enough room for another 2500+ songs. Simple, and works great.

In my truck I also use a cd player that plays MP3's. That's not to bad. You can put 11+ albums on CD. Burn one, listen to it for a while, pitch it, burn another.

I have about 150 cd's. I am not a big CD buyer. I used to buy a few and get them ocasionally for xmas. I transfered all of them to MP3. Now I just move them where I want to from there. I have never downloaded anything online.

When they started making cd's so you could not copy them on computer, WHILE at the same time, they began an AUTOMATIC AOL instilation, it pissed me off so bad I have never bought another cd since. That was several years ago.

Gary

How do you exactly turn a CD into a MP3 format. I have a MP3 player and can't seem to figure it out. I know you have to change it to mp3 format before downloading it onto your mp3 player. I use Microsoft 2000 if that helps.
thanks

You need some "ripping" software to convert to MP3 format.

There are some on http://www.audiotool.net/

Ease CD seems to work well on Windows 2000, not well on Windows 98.
There are lots of others.

Ton of software. An mp3 is nothing more then a file format. They have information associated with the songs. A good software will automatically update the information on the tags (info about the song) so that the MP3 players can extract info such as artist, album, song name. Often you have to pay to have the software updated so it will update the tag info. I use MusicMatch which works well but you get into software that starts doing "too much" which is a pain some times.

Gary

To add to Gary's post, the technical side of mp3 is that it is not "just" a file manager, it is a data compression system. It passes mucial data through an algorithm to remove musical information (data) that is theoretically below a psychoacoustic threshold. Yeah, I know, that's a big fancy word. What that all means is that the ear is not supposed to hear a difference in the music, even though a large portion of the data has been eliminated. The result is that an hours worth of music on a 800K CD becomes a much smaller mp3 file that can be easily downloaded via the internet (and as a side benefit it takes up less room on a strorage device). There were several compression systems competing with one another at one time, mp3 was popularized due to its association with Napster. It didn't hurt that mp3 software has been provided free of charge to the public.

At one time it was a big debate among audio professionals, how to compress musical info, which compression system is less audible, etc. MP3 turned all of the debate into a moot point.

Data compression should not be confused with dynamic range compression. The dynamic range of the music should not be disturbed by mp3, however dynamic range compression is normally a desirable thing with background/portable music.

Your acoustically psycho friend on the DTBB, George

Jeff,
Do you have the model number and price of the Eclispe unit you have. Does it play MP3 disc? Does it ever skip?
Thanks
Emery

quote:

Originally posted by jeff6559:
Todd Reid, Pantera owner extraodrinaire, owns a car audio store. He rocommended an Eclipse unit that is working just fine in my car.

As a side note, I mounted it under the radio delete plate.

Jeff
6559

Momma bought me an iPod for Christmas that holds 30 gigabytes of music on it, which Apple claims will hold 7,500+ songs on it. While I am watching TV in the evening, I put my CD's in the laptop and using the supplied software called iTunes I can copy an entire CD onto my iPod in about 2 minutes. So far, I have loaded about 600 songs or 2.2 days of continuous music.

They make hundreds of different adapters that will work on most brands of car stereo units, some that are hardwired into the vehicle and some that broadcast over an unused FM frequency. I have a Kenwood radio in my car and I have ordered an attachment that plugs directly into the radio and the artist, title and other song info will show up on the radio.

Apple has a website called iMusic where you can purchase individual songs for $0.99 or an entire CD for about $7 - $10, they claim to have over 2 million songs available, There are some websites where you can still download free music from although I have heard there have been a bunch of computer viruses associated with them. I haven't downloaded any music yet, I am still working on my CD collection.

While I agree there may be some loss of range due to the compression of the files, it is not something that either my unsophisticated hearing is able to detect and certainly not something you would notice with 400 horses chattering behind your head.

My goal is to have enough music loaded on the iPod that if I am able to drive the car from Florida to Vegas this year I can hit "shuffle play" when I leave Gainesville and not hear the same song twice till I pull into Vegas.

doin' the iPod shuffle
Gary #06984

[QUOTE]Originally posted by hawaii:
Jeff,
Do you have the model number and price of the Eclispe unit you have. Does it play MP3 disc? Does it ever skip?
Thanks
Emery
[QUOTE]

Emery

Eclipse 3414 but they have a whole range of systems. It was about $200 and was one of the first MP3 compatible units out there. Now they are pretty common. It hasn't skipped so far.

Jeff
6559

Thanks Jeff for the rapid reply!
Emery