Only affordable way to get lots of tunes in your car
Written: Aug 09 '01
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Pros: Does what it's supposed to, gives you access to reams of music in the car.
Cons: Shoddy build quality, poor tech support. Software has bugs.
The Bottom Line: If you can stomach the hassles and want a lot of music in your vehicle, this might be for you.
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| gunf1ghter's Full Review: SSI America MTE Neo35 Camcorder |
I have been looking for some way to take a large amount of music in the car with me. I am tired of taking CD's into the car and having them get scratched up, I am sick of having to make many compilation CD's with all of my favorite music and then having to swap them all the time and remember which ones to bring with me and which ones have which songs on them.
I was very impressed with the idea of getting something like the EMPEG unit but at over $1000 it just didn't seem practical. I was also considering the PHATBOX but in addition to the cost of that unit I would have to buy a whole new car stereo.... I wasn't big on the idea of ripping the expensive Bose audio system out of my year old Audi.
I purchased this unit with a lot of skepticism.I had been reading a mixed bag of reviews and install difficulties at www.neomp3players.com and I wasn't sure I was ready for the headaches that seemed to go with one of these units.
In the end I compromised and bought a unit that someone else was getting rid of (supposedly he just needed the cash). I got the unit and some accessories for under $300. I already had a hard drive I could use and I ordered the wired remote control.
I won't bore you with details of the units physical construction, as others have said it's pretty flimsy. The main unit is built reasonably well but to keep the depth to a minimum they really jammed everything together in a very tight package. A much better option in my opinion would have been to design the unit for a laptop hard drive, it could have been half the size.
I had a hell of a time getting the unit installed. I was having difficulty getting it to stay powered up in the car. It turns out that the unit draws a whopping 2 amps as the hard drive spins up and was having trouble. I soldered a 1000 uf 16V capacitor onto the 12V leads to fix this problem. I was also having problems with a lot of noise from the unit. I realized that this was because I had a ground loop (my stereo had a different power and ground than the NEO did) but I couldn't take my car apart to tie the NEO into the same power source. I ended up with a passable solution by purchasing a GLI (ground loop isolator) from radio shack for $20. The sound quality with the GLI is still very good and the only noise I can hear is a slight grounding whine at very very high volumes (with quiet music).
I also managed to fry the first car bay when I accidentally swiched the pos and neg leads to the car's battery. Although this was my fault it is somewhat inexcusable that they couldn't even put a relay or fuse into the unit (for 5 cents) to prevent this from making the car bay useless.
I also have had quality issues with the wired remote not displaying information correctly ... I recently upgraded to the latest firmware release and it seems to have fixed the problem, time will tell.
The unit does what it's supposed to do, and when it all works like it's supposed to it's quite a marvel... I have 150 albums in my car ready to go with the push of a button.
Some limitations of the units software should also be mentioned.
Random play is not completely random... some songs get repeated and certain alphabet selections get played more often than others (for example mine plays the red hot chilli peppers a lot). The newest software still can only build an index of 2048 songs for the random play, but since that covers all of my tunes it's not much of an issue.
The unit resumes from the last track, but it can't do this properly with an mp3 playlist. The unit will resume on the song but will continue playing other songs from the same folder, not from the playlist... this is rather irritating.
There is a new version of the unit out called the NEO CAR JUKEBOX. It fixes some of the electrical probs (has a better power regulator, better grounding, etc) but has the same software limitations.
As others have said tech support is poor, but they were flexible with me on fixing my bad car bay... they don't speak very good english so you have to be patient with them.
Hopefully 3rd and 4th generation units like this will be much better... if you can't wait a year or two for them this is the only affordable option today.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 300
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Epinions.com ID:
gunf1ghter
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Reviews written: 36
Trusted by: 6 members
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