Boss Audio Systems 648BI Car CD / USB / MP3 Player

So I bought this deck for my car after much searching for something that did RDS, read CD-RW, Bluetooth, and had a red face (or could be switched to have a red face.)

For $150 or so for a deck with all that, I couldn't argue.

Then I learned why.

While this deck has lots of options, it has some very serious flaws which could (almost) all be fixed with better firmware in the device. Flaws that would prevent me from purchasing it again given the chance to go back in time. I've contacted Boss about these issues, and they've responded with essentially, "that's how it's designed to work" and have no intentions of fixing it.

First, the deck only does RDS if it's in Europe mode. Which isn't a problem, unless you listen to AM. Because the medium wave in Europe goes up by 6s instead of 10s, many stations are unavailable to you since their frequency isn't in the right place. You could just switch from Europe to USA mode to listen to AM, but then the deck loses all of your radio station presets! Enabling RDS in North America would be a very simple software fix, but after contacting Boss, they made it perfectly clear they have absolutely no interest in fixing it.

Second, its MP3 CD reading is finicky as hell. If you don't create a CD with the exact set of options it likes, you'll simply get 'NO FILE' from the CD. I've made CDs that my Boss unit says 'NO FILE' to, that my sister's $69 Wal-mart special cheap unit read with no issues. That same CD was tested and successfully worked on a Clarion, Kenwood, and Pioneer deck. And it's not a dirty lens, as it's consistent about what CDs it will read and what CDs it will not, and there's never an issue reading regular CDs.

Third, is its randomisation feature. Don't bother with it. It's not worth the time. If you have 300 songs on an SD card and put this thing on random, you'll hear about 12 of them over and over and over, and you'll never hear the rest -- ever.

Fourth, is its inability to remember what's going on. Sometimes when you switch modes, it forgets what radio station it was on, or forgets where on the CD it was on and starts over.

Fifth, if you put an MP3 CD or SD card into random mode, the deck stops scrolling through ID3 tags and just displays RANDOM on the screen permanently. You can still get ID3 tag information by pressing the ID3 button, but then it goes away, and displays RANDOM again for all remaining songs.

Sixth, when the deck is cold, the volume knob doesn't work.  Period.  You can scroll to your heart's content, but it will always turn the volume down, regardless of what direction you're turning the knob.

Seventh, you can't insert or remove SD cards without removing the faceplate entirely.

Eighth, the faceplate is bulky as hell, and if your dash surround juts out even a little bit around the deck (or if you try an use an aftermarket dash kit's trim plate), the motorised faceplate will refuse to open, and you cannot switch CDs without removing the faceplate.

Ninth, if you hit the eject button, the deck will give you approximately 8 seconds to remove the CD before pulling it back in and making you hit eject again.  I appreciate the safety feature of pulling the CD back if I forget about it, but any reasonable person would take more than 8 seconds to pull the CD, put it back in its case, put the CD away, grab another one, open it, and take it out of the case for insertion.  The real beauty is when it does it without warning too fast and bends the hell out of the CD you were just putting in.

For $150 or so, it's an OK deck, but you'll quickly understand why it's so inexpensive.