Yesterday morning when I was set to travel back from Long Island I went to change the CD in my old JVC KD-SH99 car stereo. For a year or two now it's been having trouble ejecting CDs (typically only ejecting halfway), but this time around it went completely kaput. I fiddled with it the entire trip home (in silence, alas!), managed to get it to eject the CD that was in it but couldn't get it to play the radio or anything.

So, I went ahead and had Circuit City replace the unit with a new JVC KD-G720. The new unit is very similar to the old one with similar capabilities (the ability to play MP3 CDs is critically important). The only downside of the new unit is that it's random play is not very good. On the old unit, I could pick random play and then click the "next track" button to get it to randomly pick a new song. The new unit only gives me the choices of skipping forward one track (sequentially) or skipping to the start of the next folder, even when "random disc" mode is turned on. So that's a bit dissapointing.

But since I mostly listen to 1 hour or 2 hour dance tracks (that are one large file), it's not a huge deal-breaker. And if it does start to become a real issue, I'll look into getting the aux input installed and using an iPod's shuffle capability.

The JVC unit also has an instant-mute capability where you tap the volume knob. It doesn't completely silence the audio, but turns it down about 90%. That works better then my method on the old deck, which was to flip the "source" button once to point at the non-existent AUX input. Then I had to click 3 more times to get back to playing the CD.

It does seem to restart exactly where it left off when you turn off the car. A critical feature to me because of those 1-2 hour dance mixes that are one big MP3 file. Also good for audio books.

The other interesting feature is the USB port on the front of the unit. It allows you to plug in a USB flash drive and play songs off of it (similar to a MP3 CD). That may work well for me because I have USB keys that take the SD cards that I use for my camera and laptop. I may install a USB extension cable that lets me dangle the USB key rather then having it stick out of the dash.

While I had it in the shop, I finally had them upgrade the stock factory speakers with better 5x7 speakers. The old speakers were not enough to match the 200W peak output of the old (and new) JVC deck and I think I blew one of them a while back. Volume-wise, the new speakers are perfectly matched to the head unit. I can turn the deck up about halfway (volume level 25) and be extremely loud but I also can turn it down without suffering from the "too soft" or "too loud" problem with no happy ground. (I'm sure my brother remembers the Alpine unit we had where you could only use the bottom 1/10th of the volume bar. Beyond 10% volume and it was overly loud and was extremely difficult to get a reasonable volume setting out of it.) The new speakers also have a better sound then the old stock factory speakers (which were decent, just not high-quality).

Took them 3 hours to do the install. They had to break out the soldering gun to work on the 4 speakers and most of the 3 hours was spent doing the install of those 4 speakers. A faster worker could've done it in 2 hours, but it was worth the $75 speaker install fee not to have to futz with it myself. (The stereo install was free.) Management-wise, I think they should've had 2 people working on each car at the same time. They could've cut the customer wait time down to under an hour and I wouldn't have had to put up with smoke breaks every 20 minutes.

The only lingering issue is that he didn't put the door column back together properly, so my seatbelt retraction isn't working as well as it should. I'm going to take it in to the Ford dealer this week and let them fix it (it was already "iffy"). Might even get covered under the warranty. I tried to fix it myself, but unless I take the entire column apart again, I don't think I can get it working like it should.

One last note: The new JVC unit seems to have a better (sturdier) ejection mechanism then the old unit. The old unit gave off lots of clicks and rattles as the CD tray moved upward prior to ejecting the disk. On the new unit, it's a lot quieter and the CD seems to stay on the same plane (and the center hub moves into position instead?).

Update: Well, after playing with the JVC unit on my business trip this week, I discovered that there are 2 sets of "next track" buttons. There's the up/down arrow to the right of the display which seems to take you either to the next/previous track or the next/previous folder. But the fast forward / rewind buttons are the ones that operate like the old JVC unit. Pressing the fast forward button (briefly) will skip to the next randomly selected track in the folder or disc.

I'm also liking the ATT feature which instantly mutes the music down to volume 1 when you tap the volume knob. Or you can press and hold the volume knob to turn the deck on/off. The deck also does a very good job of resuming playing the MP3 files where it left off, a key feature for those of us who listen to longer audio files.

The volume on the deck goes from 1-50 (I think 50 is the top). A level of 20-25 is good for tooling around town and 30-35 is for heavy head banging. The new speakers sound a lot clearer then the old stock speakers.

The display is also pretty good. On the old unit, the auto-dimmer would result in a display that is difficult to read when you have the headlights on (as I always do when driving) during the day. The new unit has a much clearer and easier to read display, even with the auto-dim feature turned on.

So all-in-all, I'm pretty happy with the JVC deck now. I'm still figuring out some of its other quirks of operation but it's still nicer then my old deck.