Where can I get a CD changer installed in my 360 here in Cali?

Paris Audio on Pico Blvd. I cannot personally attest to their work (since I haven't had them do anything for me) but they seem to be bursting at the seems with business all the time (mostly exotics).

Hope that helps

DL

 

310 motoring http://310motoring.com/
Newport Audio (can't remember the number, they are next to tower records at 17th and Newport Blvd in Costa Mesa/Newport Beach.

Suprisingly enough, they are very good about adding parts to your interior and making it look stock for not a lot of money.

Or you get the CD player, I'll do it for you. I have done a lot of audio installs, including the alpine Video monitor in my 550.

 

Just curious, but why a CD changer? It's passe, don't you think? You could get an iRock FM modulator for about $40 and an iPod 40Gb for a couple hundred, not have to run any cabling or modify anything, have the ability to play several hundred CD's worth of music instead of 12 CD's or so, and be able to broadcast to you buddies so they can all listen to what you're listening to while on group drives. Oh, AND be able to transfer it painlessly between all your cars, so you can listen to your music in any vehicle you're in. Just a thought.

 

"Just curious, but why a CD changer? It's passe, don't you think?"

Hmm, must be old school

 

I've been a CD collector for a long time, and it just gets to be a hassle keeping binders of CD organizers around, transfering them to the car, changing out the CD cartridges, etc. When my wife got an MP3 player, I was an instant convert to the new technology... I'll explain it a bit for you, I think you'll like it as much as I do.

First off, it does require that you have a computer with a good amount of hard drive space, say 10 Gb to play with to get a good amount of CD's on it. You copy all the CD's you like onto your computer in MP3 form; there are different levels of recording quality, I've found that 128bit is high enough quality that I can't tell the difference between mp3 and a CD while in my car, and it's a small enough format that you can record a ton of music on your computer. The nice thing is, if you have a CD and there are songs you just don't listen to, you don't have to record them. And if you have a CD where you only listen to one song, you only record that one.

So you now have your CD's in mp3 form on your computer. Instead of spending a few hundred dollars for a CD changer and more for installation, you spend that on a good MP3 player like an iPod that holds 40 Gb of music. If you're like me and you have hundreds of CD's, you can fill up your hard drive with music, transfer it all to the mp3 player, erase it from the computer hard drive, and repeat until you have all the music you want on your mp3 player. With a 52x CDrom drive to read the CD's, it took me a few hours to transfer all the music. Good late afternoon project. I ended up using about 25Gb of room on the player to get all the music I really wanted to listen to.

You also buy a thing called an iRock FM transmitter (under $50 at Circuit City). Here's where it gets cool:

No wires to connect to the car. No plugging in adaptors to the stereo. It will work with any FM radio. You plug the iRock into the mp3 player and you're ready to go, nothing to connect to the car stereo. The iRock is a powerful FM transmitter that will override any radio station on the band that it's transmitting on, for 50 - 100 feet around it. So say you set it to 91.1 ... all you'll hear is crystal clear music from your mp3 player. And your buddies driving nearby can hear it too by turning to the same station. Very cool.

The great thing is, since it's not attached to the car, you can take it with you into any car you own, anybody else's car, or anywhere you go (with headphones), and with 40Gb of storage, you can pretty much have your ENTIRE CD LIBRARY with you at all times to listen to!!! And you don't have to worry about messing up your CD's, since I'm sure lots of them are irreplaceable... I know plenty of mine are out of print now. Keeping them pristine is a good thing. That part sold me. Done, sign me up.

And you don't have to mess with stereo or CD changer deck installs, people mucking up your interior or wiring, etc. Nice added bonus.

 

Only problem with the Ipod setup is that unless you have an AUX input on your deck you end up stuck with the FM transmitter which degrades quality a lot.

 

Well not according to his statement, "set it to 91.1 ... all you'll hear is crystal clear music from your mp3 player. And your buddies driving nearby can hear it too by turning to the same station. Very cool."

Now how about other random people that are driving around you, do they hear it too? I imagine that you set it to some non-active radio frequency.

That sounds like a great answer, thanks for the tip.

 

I have done exactly what go60racer has done except that I play the tunes through a cassette adapter. This limits the interference or reception issue.

Luckily most of my cars have a cassette player as part of their audio set up.

If I did not have a cassetter player, I would do the fm broadcast thing also.
It is harder to do in LA because there are so many channels making it harder to get consistent reception. When I did it several years ago it was hard to find an available channel. But I think the current generation of fm broadcasters are much better than the two that I used years ago and maybe those problems have gone away.

 

"While an FM modulator can be used, it will degrade the sound quality in your CDs. I would use the FM transmitter only as a last resort.

If I were rolling in a car with a superquiet exhaust and a seriously subdued noise level interior, I might worry about signal degradation or sound quality issues from the FM transmitter.

However, in a sports car the point in moot. Wind noise, engine noise, exhaust noise, road noise all wipe out large parts of your audible frequencies. So you're never going to have THX sound in a sports car. That being said, I've got a combination of Alpine amps, Boston Acoustics and Eclipse speakers in my cars in order to augment the sound quality as much as possible.

But I've never noticed any difference in quality between playing an MP3 CD in my changer deck (which is still installed) and MP3's playing through the iRock transmitter. And this thing causes interference with cars around me, I've never experienced interference in my own car. But then San Diego has weak radio stations, so maybe it'd be different in LA/OC?

 

Actually that ICE system for the iPod integration is very cool... forgot I was going to comment on liking that.

My point wasn't to dismiss it, only to bring up my personal experiences. A seamless integration design for non-fumbling while driving an f-car is a very good thing. My pain point was just that an iPod makes more economic sense, is more value for the dollar amount, than a traditional CD changer deck and install.