To celebrate (or mourn) the sale of the Jetta, I installed a new Sony head unit into the CRV. The old Alpine 3 pack player was showing its age: wouldn’t play writeable CDs, couldn’t play MP3s, the display was in Klingon. It was and still is a great player though. Very powerful especially when I had it matched with my amp and subwoofer.  Back in the early days (97-01) when I still had hair my Honda was a moving sound machine. I remember the in-dash 3 pack at the time was state of the art. As time moved on I realized how irrelevant it was to have the ability to load 3 CDs yet not be able to randomize over the 3 CDs.
The new Sony is not as powerful and although it has pre-outs, I opted not to run it through the amp. I plan to take out the amp and bundle it with the sub-woofer that’s currently sitting in the garage. Maybe I can sell the combo to a needy teenie.
Yet I love the Sony much much more than the old Alpine even though it is cheaper: it has a USB port on the faceplate! You cannot imagine how flexible this makes the device. I have multiple memory sticks about 1GB each that I can load up and reload up whenever I want. Since the majority of my music has been moved to my portable hard drive I can even plug that beast into the unit and have access to thousands of songs. This is much better than the standard inputs that some models have that allow you to plug in your iPod. What a crock: the ‘iPod’ ready units cost more than the USB units! I’m sure many idiots will pay the extra $$ for less flexibility which is why I give credit to Sony and other companies for their marketing genius.