Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)[Update: I have come to hate this unit and am negotiating a trade-in. I'll leave my review at 3 stars because it is an excellent unit if you don't care about two things:
1) It "navigates" an iPod by ALWAYS starting at the top. I have 160 GB of music on my iPod. If I'm playing (say) a Richard Thompson album and want to listen to a different album of his, on the iPod I would click Menu to show the tracks on the current album, click again to show his list of albums, scroll to the next album, click to list its tracks, and click to play. The Sony requires a minimum of 86 screen-taps to do the same thing. I say "a minimum" because the real number is approx 100: the screen doesn't register every tap. Yes, I can choose to control the iPod directly, but that reduces this unit to a very large and expensive volume control.
2) There is NO WAY to shut off the lawyer-noise. EVERY time you turn it on, you have to tap to promise you won't ever touch it while driving. Given a likely life-span of 5 years for the unit, that's ~10,000 taps. I doubt the screen is even rated for 10,000 taps on the same spot.]
Pros:
Excellent pre-amp audio quality.
Really good equalizer.
High-resolution touch screen.
Excellent, automatic Bluetooth connectivity.
Cons:
[See above, plus]
Runs INCREDIBLY hot, even when not using the onboard amps.
iPod/USB connector only on front.
It at first failed to see USB keys and iPods.
If you're using a subwoofer, you lose the separate front and rear pre-amp outs, so you cannot fade front-to-rear. Surprisingly, I don't miss this.
Poor steering wheel control integration (probably not the Sony's fault).
Too much upfront lawyer-noise: it won't play anything until you promise you'll be good and never touch it (yes, Mom: I promise...)
I avoided Sony audio equipment for many years due to poor audio quality. But I recently put myself in the hands of Charles at Systems Unlimited in Redmond, WA. (The name is not a misnomer: when I arrived he had a brand-new Bentley in the shop, getting a truly unlimited system installed.) I was very surprised when he recommended this new deck, but I trusted him, and now trust him implicity: the Sony sits at the centre of a very high-end audio system, and doesn't embarrass itself. It takes line-level Apple Lossless output from my 160GB iPod, feeds it to a Genesis Profile 4 amp which in turn feeds ultra-clean watts into two sets of Focal speakers.
I was upgrading from a decent Pioneer head unit that had driven the Focals directly (because I busted my budget buying them). I expected an improvement; I did NOT expect such an utter transformation. I put my sneers-at-technology bagpipe-playing friend and girlfriend in the car and played a pibroch at a realistic volume level: I think I might have shut them up forever, but I won't be able to tell until they get their jaws back in place. My system now sounds better than easily 99.9% of cars on the road, and is so incredibly clean that listening fatigue doesn't exist.
My other big concern about the unit is how hot it runs. I'm going to see if it is possible to disconnect the internal amps altogether: without them, it'd probably only pull 10-20 watts.
(But my real BIG concern is that I so obviously now need an extreme subwoofer upgrade to match the rest of the system.)
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