My requirements were simple: primarily black fascia, green lighting. Any additional tricks would be merely nifty bonuses.
So... I picked up a Pioneer DEH-3000IB for $250 - which included an iPod cable whatsit. Always loved the Pioneers. My first car had one for 7 years (the entire time I had it) and it only started skipping CD tracks near the end. So natural progression and all that.
Took a few hours to install - only because I was fussing around with working out precisely how I wanted to install it, stripping the old one out, soldering the wires and heat shrink binding (soooo much nicer than electrical tape).
(Although at the end of it all, there was one wire unaccounted for... Anyone know what the red and black one does?
)One of the nicest bits: the bezel is only about 2mm thick - so it sits quite neatly for those with 1st gen tombstones.
Photo time (sorry, mobile phone only
)Front on view:
Off centre - you can see how far it sticks out (not much further than most detachable face decks)
And when it's a little dark
Initial thoughts:
The sound is pretty awesome. I'm running whatever speakers were in when I got the car (I haven't looked yet) - headrest speakers plus whatever's in the doors. 4\"s? Dunno. But I get good quality sound with little distortion at volumes far beyond that which I'd normally use. In fact the biggest sound issue was MP3s encoded at 128 or 192kbs (which means I'll need to re-encode everything at 320kps now!).
No buttons along the bottom edge to mash your fingers against if your hand slips while changing gears! My old deck would often end up on random, some AM station, on fast forward or only playing 15 secs of each song (apparently this last feature is useful??). No longer!
The iPod connection is good - you can fiddle with the iPod through the deck or switch it to the iPod itself.
It has a IP-BUS connector. Yeah, don't actually know what that is, but it means there's another place you can plug peripherals in - like a Bluetooth adaptor, USB mass storage device player or CD stacker - without losing the iPod.[/img]
