gr

First of all, you are right as far as the money issue is concerned. They are expensive. But "it's kinda limited to what it can do for the price that you pay" is wrong. They are not limited at all.

I own about 500 CDs and have a good bit of stuff that I have downloaded from the internet. With my empeg, I can have every single one of those songs in my car at all times, without using CDs or anything similar, they are in the unit.

As far as finding a song, as long as your MP3s have ID3 tags on them the songs are sorted by Genre, artist, album, etc. and are very easy to find, and there is a very intelligent search function built in, you press two buttons and you can use the remote to type in the name of an album, artist, song, etc. and the unit will narrow down the list, you usually only have to type in 3 or 4 characters and it finds the song you are looking for.

As compared to a regular CD player, it has way more functionality, it loses nothing. And it interacts with all components just like any other head unit. The source code for the unit is available and there are people adding features to this thing all the time, the manufacturer is working on all kinds of new things and unless they utilize new hardware, these things will be free upgrades, for example, they are pretty close to bringing the voice recognition online, i.e. "Play Led Zeppelin, Stairway to Heaven" and you are listening to your song! Now you can even keep your eyes on the road!

I love this thing, I seriously think it is the coolest gadget around and definitely the best Car MP3 player around. I'm sure people will disagree, but I feel that it is money well spent! I just had a problem with your original post of "it's cheaply made" because it isn't - it is very far from cheaply made.

Wow... looking back, sorry this post is so long! ;>

gr

I was looking through the archives a couple of weeks ago, are you the one that got a Kenwood KDC-x915? I have one on order, how do you like it? It seemed like the best bet all 'round and it happens to be red! Always a bonus... and BTW are you in Chicago too? Sorry - I read like every message in the history of this board and am just remembering stuff, sorry if I have the wrong person!