Slashdot Mirror
Sony Hard Drive Recorder for Cars
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."
Umm.. The public wants to rip CD's in their car?
Yeah, right.
And they thought it was bad for people to use cell phones...
No, this is for kids who drive the base model Civic, because the insurance would kill them if they (err, their parents) bought the Si. Now that they've added the coffee can exhaust, 300 pound wing (someone explain why you put a wing on the back of a FWD car that isn't set up in a way to break the rear loose) $800 worth of stickers, and $2000 worth of wheels/tires, the only thing left is some stereo.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Great, when the RIAA comes calling, I can engage in a high-speed-chase while continuing to commit crimes.
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.
Man.. at $1.5k I might as well PAY for my music!
Rats would be more funny if they could fart.
- 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...
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.
Jan
It also has an auxilliary input that allows connection of an MP3 player, tape, MD player, (...) it's still nice to see a major car audio manufacturer delivering what the public wants."
Why do more car stereos NOT have an Auxilliary Input?
The only thing I really want in a car stereo is an Auxillary Input. I want to be able to take my portable CD player, iPod, whatever, and plug it into my car stereo with a minimum of sound quality loss.
I have used one of those Tape Deck inputs
(One end looks like a cassette tape, other end is a stereo jack. Plug the stereo jack into your device, insert the cassette into your tape deck, hit play), on & off for 15 years, but the sound for those things is horrible: all treble, no base. Sound is muffled (This is on 5 different stereos).
Is there some conspiracy against manufacturers putting a simple stereo input jack on the front of my stereo?
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
That's because there stupid.