Sony MEX-1HD Car CD / MP3 Player

I too purchased the unit mainly because a friend got me a smoking deal. I was sick of moving my CD collection between my house and car, then having to choose which CD I wanted to listen to. The thought of some creep stealing my CD case was a little disturbing too. When I saw this unit, I fell in love.

Before I received the unit, I was a little unclear about how you enter text. I saw another brand HD head unit had the CDDB preloaded on it's hard drive meaning you wouldn't have to manually enter text. I was disappointed when I got the unit and found that the Sony did not have this feature, or at least a way to connect it to your computer so you could 1: lookup track names in the internet or 2: be able to use a keyboard to type in track names.

Wanting to put a good portion of my CD collection on the HD, I decided to power up the unit in my house so I wouldn't have to sit in my car ripping CDs. And good thing I did, I spent the next 2 days ripping about 50 CDs.

Ripping CDs was very uneventful. Choose the folder, choose a bitrate and press Record. The process took between 10 to 15 minutes each CD.

I do have to give Sony a little credit. They didn't include any automatic way to enter track data, but the unit did include a very extensive word library with intuitive and easy controls to choose words. Basically you start spelling out the word you want using the right rotary knob and words that start with those letters show up on the bottom of the screen. Use the left rotary knob to scroll through the words and press the knob in once you find the one you want. It would autocomplete about 95% of the words you enter. And on top of that, it would suggest words that you already used first. So if you previously entered a track name "Running Away", if you spelled out "Running" again, the first word it would suggest is "Away"...made entering title track names a 10 second affair.

CDs that did have CDTEXT (which happen only to be *some* Sony produced CDs) would have the text transferred. I only had 2 CDs that did this. KORN "life is peachy" is one of them. But something went wrong and after I ripped that CD, it said the Korn CD was "Wyclef Jean"! I don't even own that CD. I had to manually go through and change all the names manually

After I loaded 50 CDs, I had over 6 gig left on the hard drive. All songs were ripped at the higher bit rate. I did not check the HD free space before I started, but I'm almost positive that it was not 10 gig. I ripped about 10 to 15 CDs the first night I had it and I was already down to 8.2 gig, then I ripped another 35 CDs and it only went down a couple of gig or so.

I installed the unit in my car and it sounded good. I connected it to stock speakers so I cant really say for sure, but it is able to play over wind noise with the windows down with no distortion. Bass and treble controls as well as a graphic EQ are available for customizing your sound.

Some notable features are: being able to arrange your music in folders, playlist options that allow you to create your own playlist, top 10 or 50 countdown, bottom 10 or 50 countdown, and my favorite, "All Shuffle".

One complaint about the folder system is you can only have albums in the top level folders. I like everything in cascading folders. If I have a top level folder "Metal", then I want to create a folder "Metallica" in "Metal" and put all the Metallica albums in there. The unit forces you to create a top level folder "Metallica".

I have not tried playing MP3s on the unit.

I was excited to find that you could hook up your "NetMD" Minidisc player to it and copy songs over digitally. However, upon further investigation, I found that my model MD player was not compatible with the head unit, even though it was a "NetMD" player. I thought that would have been an easier way to get the CD text on the head unit, but no such luck.

The display on the unit is nice. It tends to wash out in direct sunlight and easily collects fingerprints. I guess they knew that since Sony provided a little cleaning cloth!

Screen savers? C'mon, who needs them. Screen savers are for CRT monitors not car stereo displays. Why would you want to HAVE to press a button to see track information? I have the "off" option selected.

Other options in the setup allow you to remove certain inputs from the list, like AUX and AM. I never use either so it's nice to not have them clutter the screen when I'm choosing a source.

The rotary knobs rock, but the other buttons are a bit small. There is a small inconsistent lag between the rotary knob click and the time the music actually stops and switches to the next song. This sometimes makes you skip two songs. This is a minor nuisance in "All Shuffle" mode because the unit does not let you go back to the previous song.

I found when the display is flipped down to access the CD tray, the face is exceptionally sturdy.

I haven't used the radio much but it worked when I needed it. The rotary knobs did not do what I expected, though. The right knob incremented you through the presets, not tuning up and down. Not a problem, just took some getting used to, especially since I didn't have any presets set.

All in all, I absolutely love this unit. This unit is all about the ability to have my whole CD collection at my fingertips. It does this, and it does this well while looking and sounding awesome. I even thought about getting one for my house!

I would not have paid retail for it, though. It does fall short in a couple key areas. Fortunately, they are not usability issues. If you can deal with manually entering text, and you are a gadget freak like myself, it's worth trying to get a good deal on one.