Yesterday, Jess got me an early Anniversary present: A JVC KD-G700 head unit, a pair of Infinity 4" Reference speakers for the front and a pair of Infinity 5.25" Reference speakers for the rear. This is a great gift because, all four of my current speakers are blown and rattling, and my head unit is the factory Toyota tape deck that doesn't even have more than 6 FM presets, let alone the ability to play CDs or even an 8-track. All the equipment is 13 years old and in dire need of replacement. I went with her to pick it all out yesterday. I really needed to touch and feel the head units (this isn't a porno, I swear) because I'm very picky about how they perform so I had to go someplace local that would let me play with all of them (still not a porno).
I'm a firm believer in supporting the brick and mortar store. As much as I am a fan of the Internet and online buying, there are some things that I need to be able to touch and feel with my own hands. And someone has to pay to make it so I am able to do that before buying. And that's worth a few extra bucks to me. All in all, we paid $30.12 more than we would have had we bought the stuff at the cheapest online store (not counting the sales tax/shipping differences, which, if you consider that I walked home with my merchandise that day, would have cost an extra $120 or so, and I'd still have to wait 2 days).
I really liked the new Alpine units (like the CDA9827) with their song navigation features, but it wasn't worth the $60 extra to get one. It allowed you to display the title in 6 different ways: disc name, folder name, file name, tag album name, tag artists name, tag track name. Additionally, at any point, with the click of one button, you could quickly (and I mean quickly) jog-wheel your way through a list of file names or folder names until you found the song you wanted, then press another button to play it immediately. Maybe I'll regret not getting it, later on. We'll see.
The JVC KD-G700 (about which, JVC's website offers absolutely no information because it is horribly out of date, and not very well maintained), seems to be a respectable head unit. It allows quick scrolling through folder names, and slower scrolling through track names (it would be faster if it used the file name for this instead of the ID3 tag which there might be an option for). The screen real estate isn't well used (non of them, except the empeg, use screen real estate well), but it's better than most. It has one fairly long line of text and a second smaller text read out that, together, make for enough information on the screen at once. I brought an "MP3 Disk of Pain" with me to the store, filled with problems that In-Dash MP3 players have had for me in the past. Things like folders inside of folders, folders with really long names, bad ID3 tags on files, files that aren't named in numerical order (i.e, starting with 00, 01, 02, 03), and a few others. This head unit passed all of my tests.
I'm hoping to get it in the truck tonight. The front speakers and the head unit should be fairly easy. The rear speakers, however, are going to take quite a bit of coaxing. Wish me luck.
And thank you, baby, for a great anniversary present. I can't think of anything I would have gotten more use out of, nor can I think of anything that I needed more.
