Ford to stop putting CD players in cars.

the thing with most of the eq's you can find now, it seems most dont have an internal amp. also the brands that are even available.....slim pickins and I dont think that many of them are exactly high quality.

maybe another option is if an external 4 channel amp is used with the standalone eq.......but so much for ditching that heavy radio, you just added an amp.

to respond to the original topic....i guess i really dont care if cd's get ditched. sure i buy cd's, but mostly they just get ripped and thrown onto my mp3 player immediately, and all my cars have a headphone jack type plug so I can listen in the car.

That's interesting. I must be getting old. I don't own an mp3 player, or digital music thingie or whatever they're called, unless you count my desktop computer, which plays digital music files but isn't exactly portable. My wife has one, and I find it inconvenient to fiddle with a little player and copy songs to it. It's a hassle cueing up my 33 rpm records and converting them to mp3 format. I do have a lot of cassette tapes that I made back when I was buying and listening to a lot of music.

I just can't bring myself to spend money for the privilege of downloading a file over the internet that will tickle my eardrums for three minutes. If I lose the file will they give me another one for free? I want something tangible when I buy music. I can own a CD, burn copies, change formats, etc. That's worth something. Granted, I'm not buying many CD's these days either, so I doubt the recording industry is going to lose any sleep trying to attract my business.

I'll miss a nice 6-disk changer. What's an old guy to do, but turn off the radio altogether and listen to the voices in his head.

Old man out. Carry on.

Zomby woof wrote: The sound quality of MP3's (and even some new CD's) is awful. I can't listen to them, even in a car. After putting a decent system in his own car, my son finally realized what I was talking about, and found a way to fix his MP3's. I'll find out what it is. In my GT, I just took out the garbage Sony head unit the PO installed, and in it's place I'll be using a T amp, with portable CD player It.s not ideal, but it works, and it saves me almost 10 lbs.

Re-encode! Anything encode a while ago is probably at 128 kbps, which is almost unlistenable. At 320 kbps or high quality VBR I can't tell the difference between CDs and MP3's played through a T-Amp and a set of decent full range speakers (Fostex FE207's in a ML-TL enclosure) sitting in my quiet living room, let alone in a car. In the car I stream stuff to my phone, typically.

Though lately I've been using Spotify to stream music to my phone. $10/mo for all-you-can-listen music with a very good selection is nice.

speaking of purchasing cds. I tend to buy a lot of my cds used on amazon.com. For the prices you find them for on there, you KNOW people are just ripping them and re-selling the cd over and over. I am not sure about how I feel about that but it saves me money.

Considering big box stores such as best buy seem to be carrying less and less cds in stock at stores, what else can you do?

Sure I just end up just ripping them and throwing them on the MP3 player, but I am also still in the camp that its nice to have a physical hard copy, not just some mp3 files that I have to worry about losing if my external hard drive crashes.

SyntheticBlinkerFluid wrote:

mtn wrote:

SyntheticBlinkerFluid wrote: I still use the radio in my workvan, only because it has an AM/FM. But I agree that radio stations suck at least in the Chicago area.

Agreed.

Seriously, XRT - Used to like them, but I don't know when I started to not, the newer hipster music I didn't care for. The Drive - Great music at one point, but got waaaay to laid back for my taste. Also got repetitive. Q101 - Hasn't been the same since the 90s. B96 - Hip Hop and Party music, not my cup of tea. Kiss FM - Top 40 music, wife likes it, end of story. The Mix - Descent new music, wife likes it 104.3 - Used to be a popular oldies station now I have no clue. 94.7 - used to be a good classic rock station, changed to modern alternative, went country, went 80's, back to alternative, then to top 40, now it's an oldies station. US-99 - Used to be a great country station, now they just harbor all the new pop country that I hate. 97.9 - Classic Rock gone wrong, they play everything that sucks. Sorry, I can only take Metallica and AC/DC in small doses, not every hour on the hour. 100.7 - Joliet Classic Rock station that used to be good, now is the same 97.9 I listen to 103.9 XRock out of Indiana. Great Classic Rock, bearable Djs, and they have Bob and Tom in the morning and that usually helps my slow mornings.

...and this is why I love Sirius. Awesome music programming of all sorts.

My mp3 player get stale quickly and I also like listening to their talk (Stern, Jason Ellis).

As for CD quality vs mp3--I had the revelation not long ago. My ears are so conditioned to Sirius on my crappy car stereo and to mp3's on my "ipod" (Creative Zen) , that when I listened to a Catherine Wheel CD on the stereo of my wife's 2010 Fit Sport it was downright shocking. Sounded so full and vast.

I'm not an audiophile, but I do have the ears of a musician.

Sad to see the CD go. Fidelity is dead.

1988RedT2 wrote: I just can't bring myself to spend money for the privilege of downloading a file over the internet that will tickle my eardrums for three minutes. If I lose the file will they give me another one for free? I want something tangible when I buy music. I can own a CD, burn copies, change formats, etc. That's worth something. Granted, I'm not buying many CD's these days either, so I doubt the recording industry is going to lose any sleep trying to attract my business.

Yes, the free replacement service for lost cassettes and CDs was nice, wasn't it

You can burn copies of digital files too. You can store them in multiple places (mine are mirrored on three different drives, never mind the actual iPods) so it's really hard to lose one. Depending on where you bought them, you can copy them as well. All legally. Really, you were buying digital files on those CDs as well, they were just carried on a shiny disc that could be damaged.

What's happened with music is that you're no longer buying a thing that carries music. You're now buying music. Once it's digital, it's mutable. You can load it on to various formats, so you can play it on your 8-track in your Duster if you want. Tunes I ripped for the MP3 server we had at work in 1997 can now be played through the intercom system of my rally car if I want, with no loss`of sound quality due to worn vinyl or degraded magnetism of a cassette tape. Audio quality is a choice of the consumer.

mad_machine wrote:

Zomby woof wrote: In my GT, I just took out the garbage Sony head unit the PO installed, and in it's place I'll be using a T amp, with portable CD player

I need info on this. I wanted to do that to my BMW to save weight

Installation complete in the GT.

The amp only weighs about 250 grams (compared to 3 kg for the Alpine I took out), and has plenty of jam to power the 6 1/2 Infinity 2 ways. Sound quality is better than expected. New portable CD player was $30, amp was $20

This whole movement must make the CarPC guys happy.