Djlarroc

I need to get a stereo asap. Thinking of spending the extra cash on one of the stereos with a USB input. I have some questions:

1) Is it worth the extra cash over one with just an aux input? I don't have a I-pod, but wanted to play digital music either via an MP3 through the aux, or the thumb drive in the front is really slick.

2) How many songs can be put on a thumb drive?

3) Is the front USB input better?

4) What else can you use the USB input for?

Thanks

JohnRaven

I like the idea of a USB input on the front... I've never used one though...

How many songs on a thumb drive??? How big of a drive do you want? lol

You can get a 32gb usb drive for under $100 now... CRAZY... Just to give you an idea of how much music that could be....

I have:

39gb of music and roughly 9,200 songs.... Now, I do have quite a few music videos in there too, so your actual song capacity will be more than that.

Djlarroc

Thanks man. After some serious readin', I learned the usb can be used to charge the ipod, to a cell phone.

I'm going to buy a thumb drive exclusively for music for this deck, so I will probably get a 2GB. It equals to about 400 songs or so? That's good enough for me, for my truck at least.

shancerlelby

good choice, seems everyone is looking for usb and or aux headphone jacks in the fronts of decks now. we sell tons at our shop. you will wonder how you ever survived without usb thumb drives

toy_tek

I bought one last year - love it. My G/F decided she needed on too so I installed the same deck in her CRV. I use a 2gb jumpdrive, can put... i dunno... 20 albums on it? never really counted. I know at one point I had the entire Iron Maiden catalog on it plus a bunch of other stuff. Mine plug is on the front of the deck.

Here is a link to basically what I have - they've updated it a little since last year: http://www.crutchfield.com/App/Produ...enwood&tp=5684

One thing I thought of after I got mine - they also had a model with a short pigtail out the back of the radio with the USB. If you had one like that you could plug in an actual hard drive with ALL your music on it and just tuck it under the dash or put it in the glove compartment. Maybe this wouldn't work as good as I think, or maybe it would be the coolest thing ever. Access would be a little more difficult if you wanted to change whatever was plugged in though.

edit: get the smallest (physically) USB jumpdrive you can. I had one that was about 2 inches long and it eventually got destroyed, getting knocked around while sticking out of the radio. The G/F got one that is about the size of a thumbnail and its much less susceptable to damage.

ryan12321

I just put a kenwood radio with USB input into my car. It's limitations are 65,000 files so you can fit plenty of songs, but the real limiting factor is 255 different folders. I'm starting with a 20gb hard drive from an old laptop of mine. I figure I'll start with 255 albums and I can add the rest later. It is really easy to navigate between the files from what I've tested on a flash drive so far.

I'm planning on building a switch so I can have mulitple hard drives and just use the switch on the dash somewhere to flip between them. There isn't any use of going larger than 10-20gb per drive if you're limited to 255 folders IMO.

Djlarroc

Thanks for the info guys. I made my order yesterday. First, I stopped by Cartoys to see them in person. From the reading I did, I was pretty set on a Clarion, but then they showed me a Panasonic that looked pretty nice for the same price. He also mentioned that with a rear pigtail, you could tuck the usb or mp3 player in the glove box. That would be best I think, it would take an extra 5 seconds to remove it, and you could leave it in there when you left your truck. Their decks came with free basic install, but wanted to charge $55 extra for "special parts". See ya.

I ordered my deck on CF also. It was a hard decision, but my original plan was to stay around $100 since I wasn't planning on having to buy one. I got a different Clarion, here's what I went with: http://www.crutchfield.com/App/Produ...&tp=5684&avf=N They had an outlet model (last one) for $89, so I got everything w/shipping for $96.

I'm not too sure of Clarion's sound quality though, so if it sucks, I'm going to go for this one: http://www.crutchfield.com/App/Produ...&tp=5684&avf=N Panasonic usually has good SQ & you even get a flash drive with it!

We'll see.