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taiyoko posted:The worst part of my 2004 Chevy Malibu is the radio....it's just the stock radio, but it's radio/CD. No cassette, no AUX or USB. The CD is jammed to the point that I can't even find out what disk is stuck in it from the previous owner because it will neither play nor eject. I used one of these for quite awhile to play music from my phone before I got a headunit with bluetooth built in. Before getting that one I had tried probably three or four other cheap fm transmitters that didn't work nearly as well. It even worked and sounded fine after the car antenna snapped off.
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# ? Apr 8, 2014 02:03 |
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# ? Apr 26, 2024 04:20 |
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Platystemon posted:My car has a CD changer. It was obsolete when it was new. On Saturday I test drove a 2014 Jetta with a 6-disc changer in the head unit. WTF VW.
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# ? Apr 8, 2014 02:15 |
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Pivit posted:I used one of these for quite awhile to play music from my phone before I got a headunit with bluetooth built in. Before getting that one I had tried probably three or four other cheap fm transmitters that didn't work nearly as well. It even worked and sounded fine after the car antenna snapped off. I've always had bad luck with FM modulators unless I was driving in the middle of nowhere. That said, snapping off the antenna likely made it work much better. vvv GWBBQ posted:Thanks to FM capture effect (in layman's terms, stronger signal always wins unless they're really close in relative power,) decreasing your antenna's gain will make the FM transmitter work better almost 100% of the time. Ehr, yeah. Isn't that what I said? The transmitter works if you're in the middle of nowhere because there aren't stations competing for the part of the spectrum you're using on the device. Therefore, snapping off your antenna would make it work better because your over the air reception is now worse? Or are you saying the opposite is true? (Sorry, radio/ham stuff is fascinating to me, but I appreciate it only as an outsider.) moller has a new favorite as of 05:25 on Apr 8, 2014 |
# ? Apr 8, 2014 02:16 |
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Monkey Fracas posted:I really hope nobody ever tries to steal my stereo since there is literally nothing stopping them except the intricate anti-theft measures of "have the strength of at least a toddler to remove faceplate, posses a screwdriver and 30 seconds". moller posted:I've always had bad luck with FM modulators unless I was driving in the middle of nowhere. That said, snapping off the antenna likely made it work much better.
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# ? Apr 8, 2014 02:34 |
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sweeperbravo posted:Awww, my dad had one of these in his old pickup Did yours have the little screen that would show cute little graphics while the music was playing? And it would run text when you turned it on like "HELLO" and when you turned it off "GOODBYE" ? Yep, and you could almost fool your self in to thinking the animation was in sync with the music.
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# ? Apr 8, 2014 03:47 |
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My car is a 2006 Buick Lesabre. The stock stereo has AM/FM and a cassette deck. 2006 cassette deck. I have one of those cassette tape / headphone jack converters and it does the job just fine. I've heard that some models (such as mine) are built with outdated/legacy stereo stuff because the primary market is elderly people. It's a grandpa car and grandpa still has cassette tapes. Anyone know if that's true? Also, I can't even imagine the smell when you open one of those glass-top cars on a hot summer day. You're out of work finally, go to your car to head home, open the car door and... WHOOMF 130°F of pleather/vinyl/plastic fumes. I used to work at an electronics recycler, and among other cameras we would get Sony Mavica models that used a 3.5" floppy disk for external media storage. No other memory card options. You've got a whopping 1.4 megabytes of storage before swapping discs. Even when it was new, 1.4 MB was tiny and nearly useless. The strangest part is that after refurbishing and putting them on ebay, they would ALWAYS sell for a decent amount of money. Who on earth would want one of these and what would you even do with it?
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# ? Apr 8, 2014 08:35 |
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p-hop posted:I used to work at an electronics recycler, and among other cameras we would get Sony Mavica models that used a 3.5" floppy disk for external media storage. No other memory card options. You've got a whopping 1.4 megabytes of storage before swapping discs. Even when it was new, 1.4 MB was tiny and nearly useless. The strangest part is that after refurbishing and putting them on ebay, they would ALWAYS sell for a decent amount of money. Who on earth would want one of these and what would you even do with it? You could purchase floppy disks at the grocery store and didn't understand what flash memory was or how you could get more of it? I feel like the Mavicas that burned to a tiny CDROM were a way more stupid idea.
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# ? Apr 8, 2014 08:46 |
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Whoo boy the Sony Mavica. That brings back memories. My school had this and it was all the rage back in 1999 as a poor man's Polaroid where you took photos of friends with the solarise filter or much worse as it became a prank to load up the card with stuff photographed off rotten.com The thing took photos with a top resolution of 1024x768 with a stunning 1mp of capture data. You'd usually dropped the quality to cram on something like 8 pictures per disk. You kind of rationalized it by the digital camera having the advantage of deleting crap photos or having a stack of disks on hand to swap out vs a roll of film that had to be processed. Here's one of my dog from back then to give an idea of the quality.
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# ? Apr 8, 2014 09:08 |
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Pryor on Fire posted:Oh man for like a good five years there the market for the most extravagant shiny ridiculous blinky button filled stereo faces imaginable was a huge deal. I had completely forgotten about that and how stupid it seems looking back. The last vestiges of this trend are still visible in the low-end market. I bought an El Cheapo brand receiver to replace the stock unit in my '01 Cavalier (that piece of poo poo belongs in this loving thread) and holy Christ it was bright. Like, light-up-the-whole-cab-at-night bright. Seems like you'd get distracted pretty easily with all those multicolored 100 megawatt LED's blinking all the drat time. My night vision isn't the best, so I usually keep the instrument cluster dimmed, and oh boy was I in for a surprise when I got in the car the first night after putting that fucker in!
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# ? Apr 8, 2014 13:56 |
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p-hop posted:
My Car has a glas roof that pretty much spans the whole length of the car. Its not getting much hotter than a normal car. Although to be fair, when we drove it around on corse in the summer for a couple of weeks we had the "curtain" closed all the time because of the sun roasting our heads. It's really not a feature for hot sunny climates.
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# ? Apr 8, 2014 14:00 |
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p-hop posted:My car is a 2006 Buick Lesabre. The stock stereo has AM/FM and a cassette deck. 2006 cassette deck. I have one of those cassette tape / headphone jack converters and it does the job just fine. I've heard that some models (such as mine) are built with outdated/legacy stereo stuff because the primary market is elderly people. It's a grandpa car and grandpa still has cassette tapes. Anyone know if that's true? My high school had these. At the time they seemed amazing because I had never seen a digital camera before. You mean I can just put that floppy into a computer and get instant access to my photos? Blew my mind.
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# ? Apr 8, 2014 16:15 |
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HonorableTB posted:My 2013 Corolla has bluetooth, USB, CDs, and a cool touch screen for radio/stereo selection. It's miles and miles above what I used to have. Too bad touchscreens for a car stereo/information center are a terrible idea. Yes, what we need is MORE things to encourage people to take their eyes off the road. At least with your "standard" car stereo, after your initial learning curve, you can operate it by touch alone. In theory, you can with a touchscreen, but in my experience (and every thing I've seen/read,) it's never as good as a real. tactile interface and will always encourage more "eyes off the road" scenarios.
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# ? Apr 8, 2014 18:24 |
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DrBouvenstein posted:Too bad touchscreens for a car stereo/information center are a terrible idea. Honestly this is my biggest issue with touch screen technology in general for devices being used on a daily basis (ie not like ATMS and stuff where you use them less often). I like to use things without having to look at them the whole time. Like, I know you can kind of get muscle memory of how to position your hands in order to do something, but I don't know about relying on that. Then again I am also a huge luddite weirdo so
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# ? Apr 8, 2014 18:37 |
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DrBouvenstein posted:Too bad touchscreens for a car stereo/information center are a terrible idea. Ford is having this problem. They had to admit their interface sucked and they're bringing buttons back. http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/176936-ford-admits-touchscreen-defeat-puts-the-buttons-and-knobs-back-into-ford-sync I've never driven one, but the BMW control knob looks pretty cool. An obsolete and failed car technology are exterior plastic panels. Saturns had their issues, but at least your car doors didn't look like Edward James Olmos' face after a dozen dumbasses dinged you in the parking lot.
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# ? Apr 8, 2014 18:38 |
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My CX-5 has a touchscreen in the dash, but I mostly use the physical buttons mounted around the screen [or the ones on the wheel]. Partially it's the distraction factor, but a lot of it has to do with getting fingerprints all over the drat screen All of the functionality is controllable by the wheel controls except for configuring audio settings [which I don't do while I'm moving anyway] and switching radio preset pages/into different inputs, which again I don't really do when I'm moving. e. it's also not blindingly bright at night, being primarily dark blue with white text
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# ? Apr 8, 2014 18:42 |
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Krispy Kareem posted:Ford is having this problem. They had to admit their interface sucked and they're bringing buttons back. Jesus Christ, Sync sucks a barrel of donkey dicks for reasons that have nothing to do with the touch interface. It's the interface, period. Plug my iPhone in, I'm supposed to be able to give it voice commands. Except I can't, because I have too many songs/artists/albums for Sync to even deal with. That's assuming it will play at all; sometimes when I use the USB input, and tell it to play, it sits there and says "Indexing..." for a random period of time ranging from 5 to 60 seconds, and then dumps me back out into the Play menu, steadfastly refusing to play music. For a good couple of months I had to use the Bluetooth connection to get it to play, and then it started working with the USB input again. Perusing various Ford forums indicates that this is standard operating behavior, to the extent that "pull the circuit breaker to reset the retarded thing" is first-line advice. I should not have to three-finger-salute my *loving car stereo* to get it to, you know, play music from a music player which already has a functional interface.
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# ? Apr 8, 2014 19:28 |
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p-hop posted:My car is a 2006 Buick Lesabre. The stock stereo has AM/FM and a cassette deck. 2006 cassette deck. I have one of those cassette tape / headphone jack converters and it does the job just fine. I've heard that some models (such as mine) are built with outdated/legacy stereo stuff because the primary market is elderly people. It's a grandpa car and grandpa still has cassette tapes. Anyone know if that's true? Anecdotally, it was their books on tape. Even as audio books transitioned to CDs there were still libraries, personal and public, full of books on cassettes. Cassette adapters had also just become a normal accessory in the consciousness of old people. I wish this was animated, with the front flipping open to show the CD slot and closing to show the animated panel: The Twinkie Czar has a new favorite as of 21:50 on Apr 8, 2014 |
# ? Apr 8, 2014 21:40 |
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The Twinkie Czar posted:Anecdotally, it was their books on tape. Even as audio books transitioned to CDs there were still libraries, personal and public, full of books on cassettes. Cassette adapters had also just become a normal accessory in the consciousness of old people. Yes. The top thing was almost exactly what my dad had but with red accents instead of blue.
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# ? Apr 8, 2014 22:13 |
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More often than not I just wind up listening to the radio anyways. Many types of storage media have become obsolete, but the thing invented before all of them is still around and a standard.
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# ? Apr 8, 2014 22:18 |
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I.T. people like to hate troublesome equipment, like printers, fax machines, Blackberrys and executive assistants. Most of the ones I know however are not old enough to hate these: Do you see how happy this couple is to be using their slide projector? This is a lie. No one who has ever owned a slide projector was ever this happy, at least not until they found something with which to replace it. If you think assisting some bumbling executive with connecting his laptop to a TV for a Powerpoint presentation is bad you never had to help one with a goddamn slide projector. Missing slides, out of order slides, stuck slides, upside-down slides, reversed slides, carousel rotating in the wrong direction, wired remote only works in one direction (or not at all,) and the very best, melting a slide. Watching a carousel full of slides fall off the edge of a table... Christ. Slide film produces gorgeous images, and a projected image on a good screen looks wonderful but gently caress slide projectors in the ear for being the stubborn mule of presentation technology.
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# ? Apr 8, 2014 23:09 |
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Oh god, I've seen one of those. The cooling fan howled like a banshee, and there was no remote at all.
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# ? Apr 8, 2014 23:16 |
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When I imported my car from Japan, it came with a Panasonic aftermarket stereo that definitely belongs in this thread - not only because it played tape and minidisc (as well as cd's) but because it was the flashiest chromest affront to taste and common sense I've ever seen fit in a 2din slot. You start it up and get the usual "HELLO" as a motorised chrome shrouded 1" tweeter unfolds to take its position left of screen. The tweeters purpose is not to enhance the music, but to enable you to fully appreciate the loud chimes that will be played when you change track, change radio station, adjust the volume (holding volume button results in a chime for every volume increment - all 64 of them), or anything else you can imagine. The screen shows the usual assortment of visualisations only vaguely related to the music, and a parabolic equaliser is available if you can find it. The audio output is actually quite good, and I'm guessing it was well made given that it weighs as much as a similarly sized car battery. I can't find pics online but I do still have the thing in storage, I'll will try and get footage of it running.
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# ? Apr 8, 2014 23:18 |
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Dick Trauma posted:Most of the ones I know however are not old enough to hate these: *whirrrrrr* *clack* *whirrrrrr* *clack* "poo poo! - don't look kids!" *clack* *clack* *clack* *whirrrrrr* I also find it amusing and awesome that my ancient car is able to get an retrofit purely from plugging in my phone into the AUX port of the radio and I have in-car GPS, hands free operating and calling. And only a few years ago friends were cramming in micro ATX computers into their Lotus Exige (his mid-life crisis car) and performing witchcraft with the car's power and size limits (the PC was hidden in the boot) just to have a fancy pop-up touch monitor that would slide out and play MP3s. Nowadays you'd just buy a tablet and a mount. Another went so far as to jury-rig to his steering wheel a tin of mints, to act as a housing case for a wired remote for his MP3 player. BogDew has a new favorite as of 23:42 on Apr 8, 2014 |
# ? Apr 8, 2014 23:37 |
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That was a big problem I had when I went to get a new headunit for my Jeep. I just wanted a simple radio with with a CD player and aux in, but every single radio at the store is some crazy neon colored mess of color changing lights. Why can't anyone make a nice simple radio that doesn't light up like a red light district, and feels at least half like a stock radio.
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# ? Apr 8, 2014 23:46 |
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I've been through 8 car stereos in the past several years, from very basic up to $2000 double din touch screen navigation units with all the bells and whistles. About 6 months ago I found what I think is the best, non flashy, easy to control stereo with the essentials. The Blaupunkt Toronto 420BT. It has bluetooth built in, front and rear USB inputs, plenty of preamp outputs, two knobs, and lighting that isn't obnoxious and tacky. (best pic I could find online) I love it because it's basic, but it does everything I need it to and it does it all well, better than stereos I've had that were literally 10 times the price. empty baggie has a new favorite as of 00:29 on Apr 9, 2014 |
# ? Apr 9, 2014 00:25 |
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I've never understood a rear USB input in a car stereo. What do you use it for, and how do you hook it up?
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# ? Apr 9, 2014 00:31 |
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Captain Trips posted:I've never understood a rear USB input in a car stereo. What do you use it for, and how do you hook it up? A lot of apple devices come with a cord to charge/transfer to a computer that has a usb dingle on one end.
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# ? Apr 9, 2014 00:33 |
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sweeperbravo posted:A lot of apple devices come with a cord to charge/transfer to a computer that has a usb dingle on one end. No, I mean, a rear USB is going to be inside the dash. How do you get to it, and why not just have two on the front?
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# ? Apr 9, 2014 00:36 |
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Captain Trips posted:No, I mean, a rear USB is going to be inside the dash. How do you get to it, and why not just have two on the front? I ran a 6 foot lighting cable from the rear of the deck to my center console. No wires sticking out of the front of the stereo, but I have the option in case I have another device I might want to use.
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# ? Apr 9, 2014 00:45 |
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Captain Trips posted:No, I mean, a rear USB is going to be inside the dash. How do you get to it, and why not just have two on the front? You run a cable from the back to somewhere in the front. It makes it look "cleaner" than having the cable go in the front, I guess. empty baggie posted:I've been through 8 car stereos in the past several years, from very basic up to $2000 double din touch screen navigation units with all the bells and whistles. About 6 months ago I found what I think is the best, non flashy, easy to control stereo with the essentials. The Blaupunkt Toronto 420BT. It has bluetooth built in, front and rear USB inputs, plenty of preamp outputs, two knobs, and lighting that isn't obnoxious and tacky. I have one very similar. It's weird, because it doesn't have built-in Bluetooth, but it came with a Bluetooth dongle to plug in. It has front and rear USB ports, so naturally I plugged it into the rear one. It's nice to simply connect my phone for music/podcasts and not have to dig out wires/have them get tangled in the gearshift and such, but it does have one weird problem: It has no CD player, just the Bluetooth, USB, and Aux, so because of that, it's missing most simple controls. It has Next and Previous buttons, but no play/pause or stop. Kind of annoying because I have to fumble with my phone to pause or stop, which as I already mentioned, isn't a good thing to do while driving.
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# ? Apr 9, 2014 00:56 |
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DrBouvenstein posted:You run a cable from the back to somewhere in the front. Exactly. If you're going to be using the same device every day, it makes sense to have one "permanent" cable, while leaving the front USB open for random devices, and it makes the dash look less cluttered by not having wires sticking out of the front all the time. quote:
Mine does have play/pause, but honestly I tend to use the controls on my phone a lot of the time, but I have a decent mount so the phone stays in a good position to where it's not very distracting to hit play or pause. That is one downside to the unit in that it's difficult to navigate through a large music library from the deck itself, but then again I've had multiple touchscreen stereos that weren't any easier to navigate with, even the Pioneer App Radio, which was specifically designed to work properly with iPhones (There's a stereo for this thread. What a piece of poo poo that thing was).
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# ? Apr 9, 2014 01:06 |
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Rear USB would be good for something like my car, which has a female USB port in the armrest for connecting devices. If a car already has one of those ports, you could wire that up that way I guess. I loved my old Blaupunkt MP3000 deck. An early MP3 deck, it could load MP3s off of CD-Rs, had a separate subwoofer channel, and sounded AMAZING. Sadly, it died, and I replaced it with another Blaupunkt which was almost the same and also good, but didn't have the separate sub channel and just never sounded quite as nice. The display was nice though - blue background with a white dot matrix display. Displayed track/folder info nicely, got blurry as poo poo in cold weather, which I found funny. Not too bright, but bright enough that it gave my interior a cool blue glow. Pictured: A Good Stereo. Eventually the second one's disc drive died, but I kept using it for YEARS via aux input wired to a 3.5mm jack I punched through the dash. Bluetooth car audio is awesome. The quality is good, no wires is nice, but it sucks that newer Android builds can't beam track info to my car like older Android could. I wonder if this has been worked around yet, or if it's unfixable because of the new BT stack [that's what I heard caused it anyway] e. for reference my phone is running a custom ROM built on 4.2.2 Code Jockey has a new favorite as of 01:08 on Apr 9, 2014 |
# ? Apr 9, 2014 01:06 |
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Code Jockey posted:
Strange that it wouldn't have a sub out. The Toronto 420 has front, back, and sub out.
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# ? Apr 9, 2014 01:08 |
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empty baggie posted:Strange that it wouldn't have a sub out. The Toronto 420 has front, back, and sub out. Yeah, it was weird. I think that was the only meaningful difference between the MP3000 and the replacement, which I had to get because the MP3000 got discontinued or something. I thought it'd be okay, and it'd still sound just as good, but how wrong I was.
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# ? Apr 9, 2014 01:10 |
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Dick Trauma posted:Slide film produces gorgeous images, and a projected image on a good screen looks wonderful but gently caress slide projectors in the ear for being the stubborn mule of presentation technology. *-for 35mm. All medium and large format slide projectors are awesome.
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# ? Apr 9, 2014 01:41 |
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Carousels were very expensive even used, so I had something like this: Which was metal cased and had no cooling fan. It also only held two slides so you had to get really close to it to change them, and, well, you know The Cornballer from Arrested Development? It was like that every time you changed a slide because the action of sliding the new slide into it would move the projector a little bit and you'd instinctively touch its white hot metal casing. I think the manual even said something about not leaving any slide in there for too long in case the heat of the bulb ruined it. I eventually splashed out for a used Carousel. edit: I'll bet 110 film looks just amazing projected onto a big screen!
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# ? Apr 9, 2014 01:56 |
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Horace posted:edit: I'll bet 110 film looks just amazing projected onto a big screen! Ha! Why not go all the way? I'm sure these pieces of poo poo have already been discussed in this thread. Tiny negative even smaller than 110 and the visual acuity of a bat with cataracts.
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# ? Apr 9, 2014 02:03 |
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This is the stereo I currently have in my truck: The Clarion DUZ385SAT. I've had it for a few years now and it is the best head unit i've ever owned. Not too flashy, very simple, works with everything I've thrown at it, and matches my truck's interior to look almost stock. I also have a permanent hidden iPhone cord hooked up the rear USB input that runs under my bench seat and is hidden in the middle of the seat because I'm loving classy like that. Then there's my friend's bone stock stereo, a 2003 Toyota JBL unit with a tape and CD player that doesn't play burned discs, like wtf? I had a Kenwood CD player that I bought in 1997 that played burned discs just fine. Her stereo plays regular CDs just fine, but pop in a burned disc (not even a file disc with AAC and MP3s on it, just a true-to-original CD) and the unit whirs and whooms, then spits the thing out in disgust. That sucks for long drives.
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# ? Apr 9, 2014 02:30 |
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Code Jockey posted:Eventually the second one's disc drive died, but I kept using it for YEARS via aux input wired to a 3.5mm jack I punched through the dash. My current stereo as I mentioned in my last post is an OEM Blaupunkt. It does indeed stream track info to the screen, and track browsing. S3 with a 4.4 Cyanogen custom.
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# ? Apr 9, 2014 03:15 |
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Horace posted:edit: I'll bet 110 film looks just amazing projected onto a big screen! I love my medium format projector, which does double duty as an art deco death ray. GWBBQ has a new favorite as of 03:26 on Apr 9, 2014 |
# ? Apr 9, 2014 03:23 |