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Sony Hard Drive Recorder for Cars

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the step-in-the-right-direction dept.

blues5150 writes "Sony has introduced the Sony MEX-1HD. This is an in-dash CD/Receiver with a 10 giagbyte hardrive built in to rip CD's at 8X speed. It also has an auxilliary input that allows connection of an MP3 player, tape, MD player, and/or an optional Sony plug-and-play XM Satellite Radio tuner. The price is a little steep at $1,499.99, but it's still nice to see a major car audio manufacturer delivering what the public wants."

4 of 253 comments (clear)

  1. Kenwood Music Keg by Cryptnotic · · Score: 5, Informative

    Kenwood has a similar product, the Music Keg. Their version works like a CD changer with a removable hard drive cartridge.

    --
    My other first post is car post.
    1. Re:Kenwood Music Keg by Josh+Coalson · · Score: 4, Informative
      Kenwood has a similar product, the Music Keg. Their version works like a CD changer with a removable hard drive cartridge.

      And it's half the price and plays FLAC also (the MusicKeg is a re-branded PhatBox).

      Pioneer has an in-dash unit like Sony's for around ~$2K but you can't even rip MP3's from ISO-9660 discs on that. Besides, who wants to spend all that time trying to rerip and recatalog everything on another box?

      An iPod or a portable drive like the PhatBox is the way to go.

      Josh

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      FLAC - Free Lossless Audio Codec
  2. Useless, closed, proprietary product by Radi-0-head · · Score: 5, Informative
    I had considered the purchase of one of these units (several months ago, indcidentally -- this "news" is kind of old) and did a little homework on it... here's why it sucks, and why I won't buy one:

    - Proprietary compression
    The unit uses Sony's ATRAC compression which is proprietary and heavy on DRM. Even MP3's which you copy from a memory stick to the unit are converted to ATRAC, resulting in loss.

    - No direct PC connectivity
    You can't wire up, say, an ethernet jack to this unit as you could with the Empeg, etc... and copy files to it from your computer. No way. You must either sit in your car and rip (at a paltry 8x) every friggin CD you want into the unit, or use a Memory Stick back and forth from your PC to this unit. An utter waste of time, IMHO.

    Pioneer Electronics came out with a unit that is extraordinarly similar yet has a larger, easier to navigate menu system... it still, however, suffers from the same shortcomings as the Sony unit. I am not sure what type of compression Pioneer uses, though.

    Anyway, my two cents...

  3. Re:I'm confused by tempmpi · · Score: 5, Informative

    Sony doesn't make regionless DVD players. Some of their players can just be hacked quite easily with the right cable and some floating around firmware. Most Pioneer players can be made regionfree in the same way.
    The MP3 player here also contains DRM and you can only play MP3s from CD-R(W)s. You can't transfer MP3s to the HDD, you can just rip normal audio CDs to ATRAC3 and keep them on the HDD. If you want you can transfer tracks to a MagicGate Memory stick but after you have transfered a track to the memory stick you can't play it from the HDD. Very likely you can't rip copy-protected CDs.
    In the end: nice idea, but it sucks because of the price and DRM.

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    Jan