One of the bonuses of being back in the UK is I get to drive my Impreza.
After 1 week of getting back to the UK the Alpine CD changer CHM-S611 failed.
I followed some instructions that my brother found on the Internet and levered the Alpine TDM-7544R head unit out.
I was in luck, the guys who fitted the Alpine unit had installed a Subaru to ISO converter kit.
I had to rip the passenger seat out to get to the CD changer to remove it.
Ah well CD is dead technology. Imagine a 700Mb disk with only 10 songs on!
After a few hours searching the Internet and I found a reasonably priced Blaupunkt Hamburg MP57 that had Bluetooth, USB input with no restriction on the thumb drive file size, and a front aux port. Ordered it from Car Audio Direct and it arrived the next day.
With a lot of help from Kimi and her small hands I connected all the rear cables up, ISO, antenna, mic out, USB and slotted the head unit home.
The rear USB port connects to a cable which I threaded through round the back of the centre console into the glove compartment. Hooked up a 8Gb flash drive I now have 2000 songs on demand.
The rear mic I threaded through the centre console and up through the steering column. The mic clips neatly to the indicator stalk with only a little bit of wire showing.
The Hamburg MP57 is a great bit of kit, but like most embedded devices it suffers from a few useability issues. I am convinced the software engineers that develop for embedded devices do not do any HCI training.
The unit handles the 8Gb memory stick with no problems. But the way it indexes songs and folders is poor. It simply read the current directory contents table in order. This means it displays files/songs in the order they were written to the memory stick NOT alphabetical order. This makes adding a track or new folder/album appears at the end.
Play lists are supported but, they have to be stored in the root folder.
The bluetooth functionality is a bit basic. The biggest shortcoming is that it does not access the phones phonebook. You can store 5 numbers on the unit for easy dialing but after that you have to use the phone. However the transmit and receive sound quality is excellent. One thing I have noticed is that when receiving a call the ring is loud and clear but you have to turn up the volume to hear the voice after answering.
All in all an excellent bit of kit for a reasonable price.