car MP3 player - The Unofficial BMW M5 Messageboard (m5board.com)

karlcchen · 6th February 2002, 00:47

I am trying to decide whether to get a normal
highend CD headunit or a MP3 CD-R CD-RW player
headunit.
Anyone has experience with car MP3 player.
How is sound quality ? And easy of use
to select a song ?

The good thing about MP3 is number
of songs you can play in one single CD.

Karl

Mmm-Five · 6th February 2002, 12:20

I have a Kenwood MP-6090 (called something else in the US) - and I have my complete collection of 300+ CD in the car with me now.

It's quite a powerful system, though it is connected to a 400w amp in the rear.

Sound quality is okay, but I recorded the MP3s at a medium, rather than high, quality to save space.

It doesn't sound much worse than the CD player I had originally, but unless you can get rid of all the road/wind noise in the car then I wouldn't worry about sound quality too much.

The Kenwood cost me £250 ($360).

Xipe · 6th February 2002, 14:17

How do you chose songs? Let's say you have 300 songs and want to listen to a specific one? Is it tedious?

What about support for Winamp playlists? That'd be real nice aswell.
If not, can you group the songs in directories or in some other way?

Mmm-Five · 6th February 2002, 15:03

The player reads the songs from a standard ISO disc and uses the folders and sub-folders as directory names. Depending on how you want to sort them you can have them by album, by artist, by genre, etc.

I have mine by artist, then album.

To go to the next folder/album you simply push the up/down button on the fascia and (after a few seconds) it displays the next folder name. It then comes up with the ID3 tag information (only v1.1 at the moment) with song title and artist scrolling across the display.

I assume that you would have to know more or less what was on the CD to find it, just like looking through a CD collection at home.

I have all my MP3 CDs labeled and try to keep to one artist per CD - unless I only have one album of course.

This is the US equivalent of mine - KDC-MP8017 (KDC-MP6090 in UK)

The more expensive alternative

And their latest idea . . .

karlcchen · 6th February 2002, 20:48

I am looking into Blaupunkt "San Francisco" CD receiver.
It can automatically increase volume when
engine and road noise increase.
They called it Dynamic Noise Covering.
The unit also have aux input, so I can
add portable MP3 player there.

But M5 engine itself is another kind of
music to my ears too when I am in mood
to listen it.

Karl