Pioneer DEH-8600 Car CD / MP3 Player

This is both a great-sounding and great-looking new deck from Pioneer. The simple, elegant face and smooth OEL animations really add to its appeal. The text is very bright and readable. The deck sounded great right out of the box, even before doing much tweaking. For anyone who owns Pioneer's higher-end home theater receivers, you'll especially appreciate the auto-speaker set-up and equalization using the microphone (included accessory). I found that only rather minor adjustments were needed after running this feature. The remote is easy to use, but is a bit fussy in terms of requiring a pretty direct line of sight. I have yet to try out the XM-ready feature, so cannot comment on this. Lacking is the ability to display radio data text (artist, song title, etc) that would seem to logically accompany the CD text capability..odd. I also would have liked a preset-volume feature that allows you to define a volume level for power-up (a nice feature I've liked in other decks).