JVC KD-SX980 Car CD / MP3 Player

After I bought the Forester last August, I started shopping for a good MP3 CD player to replace the factory cassette deck. I hadn't upgraded the factory stereo because I knew I wanted an MP3-capable CD player, and the best that Subaru was offering was a mere six-disc changer.

For those who don't know, MP3 is a particular compression format used for audio files that have been converted for playback on a computer. An MP3 player is simply a highly specialized computer that can read MP3 files and produce audio from them.

When I started shopping, I knew that I wanted:

1) A rotary volume control. Call me old-fashioned.

2) MP3 ID3 tags for displaying the track name, album, and artist during playback. I didn't care whether it was ID3v1 or ID3v2, as long as I got the album, performer, and song title instead of "03-220" or some other arcane number.

3) Long filename support. The old DOS-limited 8.3 filename standard has always annoyed me. ISO 9660 Level 1 and 2 support, plus Joliet, means that I can have up to 64 characters in a filename, including directories.

The KD-SX980 provides all of these, plus a few features that are very nice, but weren't part of my purchasing decision.

The backlighting/display brightness can be connected to the vehicle's dash lighting to dim automatically at night. Otherwise, the display can be *very* bright at night, to the point that it's almost possible to read maps without turning on the dome light.

The front panel includes a headphone-jack-style AUX plug-in that will accept line-level input from portable MiniDisc or other player. So, if you already own a larger MP3 jukebox with a built-in hard disk, you can play your music back through the KD-SX980 by plugging in from your headphone output into the AUX input, and selecting it as your playback source.

The player also supports the CD Text format, which will display the disc title, performer, track title, current track number, and elapsed playing time on non-MP3 CDs that include the CD Text format.

The ability to label radio stations with text is nice - once you've programmed the stations, it's a lot easier to find the one you want when the screen shows something like "KEDJ - ALT" instead of "106.3".

I'm not sure about the remote control. For most of my driving, I'm the only person in the car. When I'm not the only person, then it's one other person in the passenger seat. Given the size of the remote and its buttons, it's far easier for me (or someone in the passenger seat) to control the stereo by using the controls on the face. I can only imagine that the remote might be useful for someone in the back seat to adjust things.

The removeable faceplate is a little odd. There's an arm that sticks out of the unit behind the face, which controls the face flipping down to insert a disc. Every time I remove or replace the faceplate, I feel like I'm going to break the unit.

In conjunction with my Power Mac Dual G4, managing my music has gotten a lot easier. I simply throw the disc into the Mac, and tell iTunes to rip it to MP3.

iTunes connects to the Internet CD Database, pulls the CD name, artist, track/title information, and records it with each track as they get ripped to the hard disc.

Then, I organize the music by genre. I've got two discs each of 600MB for 1980's, for Irish/Celtic folk, and what I call "Modern Folk" which includes Wall of Voodoo and the Talking Heads. One disc each for movie soundtracks and comedy (George Carlin, Robin Williams, Denis Leary) and one or two other discs fill out the ten-disc carrier on the visor in the car.

Then iTunes will record the music to CD for me, using CD-R.

The added benefit is that my original CDs stay at home, and I don't really care if someone steals the MP3 CDs - I'd just burn new ones from my archives.

At over ten hours of audio per disc, I've got enough music to take me almost anywhere!