John101477

thats a heck of a deal there nychop. I have worked many years with kenwood among other makers, but ur the first i heard of that uses it in this fashion. i may have to see what my hard drive does with my unit, might be interesting. i will call alpine this week and see if this unit would be compatible, although the iPod is much more handy than my hard drive.
thanks for the share.

aviator

Exactly my plan chopper... once I get my excelon... just use USB flash drives...

Hayes

You can always run the iPOD through a 3.5mm-RCA cable to an amp, then out to speakers. Control everything through the iPOD and get good sound. Take the iPOD when you leave so that prying eyes can't get to it.

seanmearse

Here is another thought from me. if i am cruising a dirt road or exploring on some randomn trail, i leave the tunes on. But for the most part the stereo is off and the cb on. Plus, i dont look at the tach when i am getin' it done, i prefer to hear what my engine is doing, what my spotter (if i use one) is saying, what gets yelled at me- i.e.- diff hung up, oil spraying everywhere. Try this, next time you are out wheeling, shut off your deck and listen to your truck, its rather peaceful and calming.

NYChopshop

one thing I should point out, the usb HARD DRIVES like the one I use is nothing more than a laptop hard drive, meaning it has moving parts. You can seriously screw up a hard drive if you abuse it too badly, but if you get one that has a warranty, go for it! My only suggestion would be to use a smaller capacity (I know, I know...) solid state memory device like a USB flash drive or four since they're so cheap these days. Then you have as close to bulletproof music as you can get anywhere.

Oh, and my excelon deck (see build thread in signature for pics) has a built in USB cable not just a slot, so all I have to do is wrap my hard drive in a T-shirt for padding and drop it in my glove box where I ran my USB cable to for some extra shock protection not to mention key-ed locking out of sight theft prevention. Just a thought.

John101477

i thought about that this morning chop so really it wouldn't cure the reason for the iPod or MP3 at all. I used to install car audio but it has been years since, besides doing installs for friends and myself. and i am not a computer guru at all. makes me wonder if it is possible to get perfect sound today. it is horrible even classical cd's have a bunch of clipping in them. when i was in audio school, they had a sound room with some incredible equipment and showed us what the average cd had to offer. then they showed us how a lot of rap even had clipping added on purpose. i wonder how good the sound would be through a memory card? if you had a card reader and used sd cards... no moving parts but can u store uncompressed audio in a 8 gig sd?

bigt

just get a SIRIUS SAT RADIO!!!
plays over the fm

i have the old ones so everyone in like 250m radius can hear mine on 88.1

im hooked on it almost as much as yotas

NYChopshop

well, for one thing, I have sirius satellite radio. More often than not I'm disappointed with the programming and have the sinking suspicion that I could do a better job at set list selection than those people. Also, since XM broadcasts at crap MP3 quality, and sirius broadcasts at basically decent mp3 quality, I find the artifacting to be absolutely insanity inspiring. FM rebroadcasters are also a big fail, and I've never had a good experience with the four or five of them I have worked or installed for friends (yes, I know, I have some idiot friends). Try running a headphone style cable out of your ipod if you so choose, and you should be able to get an audible boost in sound quality.

John, what do you mean by clipping, peaking levels that create squared waves? Most rap albums are made in a closet with a cheap protools rig these days, so there is no accounting for the quality. All of the big recording studios that had amazing acoustics and big 2" reel-to-reel analog recording equipment the size of a small car... They can't pay their own rent anymore and are all closing. Ultimately, the square waves are less of a big deal on a mastered CD than on anything analog. If you picture analog audio as a fluid squiggly line (think heart EKG monitors in the hospital), and digital audio as a graph paper grid. Now draw that squiggly analog line on some graph paper, and mark the closest line intersections on the graph paper and draw the line in connect-the-dots fashion. That's digital audio. The digital audio on CD's is a digital approximate representation resembling the actual sound. This is why low quality MP3s sound so bad, bigger more noticeable ruling of 'graph paper'. The key is the ear-test. If you can listen to the music and enjoy it, it's obviously of sufficient sound quality.

PIC EDIT: for 'clipping':


I do NOT suggest you go with a little camera SD card, that's unnecessarily compact and therefore pricey. I would suggest something like a real USB flash drive. They are encased in plastic and really tough to kill with vibration. They make flash drives up to 64 GB in size, which is like 90 albums in CD format. You can grab those suckers on ebay for $50 each and up, so if you absolutely need 120 gb of music or whatever, just cowboy up and buy another one!

aviator

Some other issues with Sat radio is that it is not true Sat-to-unit transmission it depends on cell towers to broadcast the signal "locally" [I have this from Sirius/XM themselves] so no cell service/no sat radio service... lots of places around central/northern Ont. the signal goes silent.
I've heard there may be some new tech. coming that will allow next gen CDs to approximate an analog wave form more closely...
There are still some old tech. studios out there but they are getting fewer and as result time is becoming more expensive which means less bands/labels will be able to afford them. Many concert halls are equipped to record for larger groups/orchestras and so on but they can suffer from "hollow room" effects if there are no bodies in the seats which really limits them to "live" recordings to get the best quality...
What I need to get is one of those turntables with a USB port so I can transfer some of my old LPs to digital so they'll be more portable... IK I'll lose some of the quality but enough should survive to make it pleasurable... come to think of it I've got a few 8-tracks that need to be digitized as well...
Sorry for the off topic drift...

John101477

chop, i believe we are on the same wave length here. in one of the peices of equipment they used to demonstarit clipping it woud show this same graph but in three rows. they played several cd's and showed where we actually loose the correct play back vs some other disks that played a diferent format ( i forget the name it has been 10 yrs after all). the other format was almost tripple the price of a regular cd but the audio was so clean and crisp you felt like you were in the recording studio. why they can't perfect acurrate playback at a reasonable and useable price is beyond me.

as for xm or sirus, i was around when they first started and their technology sucked as bad then as it does now, since they failed try to improve. i still find it hard to beleive xm got all the awards at CES the year they started. i feel apple is headed down the same path.

aviator

IK what you mean... we have sat phones that can talk directly to the sat [granted with an antenna as thick as a broomstick] that you can hold in your hand. Why can't they improve the receiver technology so the sat radios can receive the signal directly from the sats instead of going through the cell net system?
And the radios themselves have'nt changed for years, what about new features? more program recording time? It might be nice for some commuter types to be able to "pvr" a whole afternoon game coverage to listen to on the way home instead of just the first 60 mins... or a few old radio stories to listen to...

John101477

i just do not understand why it is so hard to get acurate playback in any situation. after all that is the idea behind listening to music... like the long intro to hotel california, hendricks screamin guitar, or faith hills perfect high note carry. there is no reason not to be able to hear it like it was done in a studio. i was able to get close using home speakers in a mobile install a few times but it is very hard to do and even then your only as good as your weakest link. in a lot of situations, that is the format it is being played from.

NYChopshop

This may be true, but at home you don't have the same types of background noise you do when you have your engine on, let alone roar down the road at highway speeds. This is why I always say soundproofing first. From that point, you can't get a large listening area of 20hz-20khz flat response across the entire frequency range in a car, background noise notwithstanding, but you can really get surprisingly close. Appreciating the fact that you're in a car, and although at a certain volume you can get amazingly clear sound, you should build your stereo to best suit the music you listen to. Oftentimes home stereo stuff is built with listening quality in mind over power handling numbers where car stuff is often built to look a certain way or fit a certain hole or to put out a certain volume with a certain wattage to look good on paper (perfect example: sony xplod).

Eagles, Hendricks, I qualify those as classic rock. To get the best parts, and the soul of that music, you need accurate and more importantly clean high end, and plenty of midrange, and midbass with accuracy over SpLs as the focus of the design. Subs wouldnt be necessary, and if you do get them, small diameter speakers in a sealed box would give you all the response down low you would ever need for that type of music. Ultimately, you can be really happy with what you're listening to for a couple hundred dollars. Hard rock is more volume in the midbass than clarity in the midrange. More emphasis on subs too. Hip-hop is all about bass SpLs, and electronica is really about high volume across the entire frequency range. For delicate music like classical or jazz or somesuch, having your speakers properly mounted, having clean over powerful components (not always that expensive), and having good sound isolation (soundproofing up the ARSE) is what will give you a great listening experience. Anyhow, my point is you build your system around what you listen to, and having a quality equalizer (be it built in to the head unit, passive, built into an amplifier, active graphic... whatever) will be your best friend in getting your music to do what you want for you. Bass blockers and the like for distortion protection on speakers that arent supposed to be handling lower frequencies will help a lot.

bigt

i been far far far up north where no cellphone works but my sirius did.
if u dont like thesongs call oeemail the ones u wanna hear i do all the time

John101477

yeah chop, i totally agree with that. i think part of the issue with car audio is actually in the wave length vs. the in car area. i do disagree with ur idea on bass for the eagles (long intro has some major bass) but hendricks is all about the screamin guitar. As for the home speakers in car audio, the vehicle i refer to were complete interior rebuilds for sema and ces so you have options of speaker placement. pretty much the only way you have options in trying to build a good sound stage. and yes we always used tons of sound deadening material (dynamat, accumat) in both sheet and liquid form. todays vehicle are a lot better with out side interference but the best ones (quietest) are almost impossible to work on. (bmw, mercedes, audi)

jamanred

Why would anyone want to kill their phone battery on listening to music in their car? Just buy an MP3 player... If you buy an iPOD, alot of aftermarket HU's have iPOD controls built in.. Just don't waste time on a nano..

Although NYChopshop's Kenwood sounds like a killer solution..

aviator

If you want to really test a system across the full range you really need to go with some classic soul/funk from Stax/Motown... think Issac Hayes "Shaft" distorted Guitar, high strings, horns, and deep down driving warm bass line intro. Stevie Wonder "Uptight", The Sylvers "Boogie Fever" good vocals, Kool & the gang "Celebration" warm bass, good crisp horns,
Of course for something more "progressive" to test your system there's always ELP's "Nutrocker" or "Fanfare for the common man".
If you want some classic rock Deep Purple's "Kentucky Woman" off the book of talsyn album, really dirty guitars and vocals, very garage sounding...
Just some of my thoughts lol

jamanred

I would just be worried about a hard drive wrapped in a tee shirt in the glove box. I am sure there is a more semi-permanent solution..LOL

BTW.. I saw a unit on crutchfield that enhances ripped music. Might be an idea to keep your tunes sounding fuller. All depends on ones wallet and the overall goal..

John101477

eh i have never been a fan of the "dirty guitar" or "garage band" sounds. if you can get a hold of really good orchestra music (not a fan still) you really get a feel for it because of the lack of vocals. thats why i like the LONG intro from hotel california. i used to use it a lot to demo for the rock crowd, ludicris or dre for the rap crowd, and i had a mix of country for the counrty folks. metalica and acdc for the hard rockers. nothin sells a deck & 4 faster than enter sandman, never could figure that out....

aviator

Not necessarily a fan of dirty guitar/garage sound either but Deep Purple really has an earthy quaility to it like a lot of early rock/60's rock not overly processed and cleaned/polished... sort of natural sounding like you'd get in a bar with all the poor accoustics those kind of places have...
On the other hand I love Prism/Styx and 80's music too and you can't get more polished then that lol...