Sony's new Xplod Car Audio deck "MEX-1HD" looks amazing in both in product design and consumer benefit.

The deck features a CD to hard drive recording system to allow you to store digital copies of your CD's to your system for future playback. It packs in 8X CD encoding capabilities with it's 10GB internal hard drive, so you can encode CD's and never need to flip through CD's in the car again. With 165 hours of recording time on the drive it should allow most consumers to encode all of their music collection so it can be stored in the vehicle.

Sony has incorporated everything you would expect for a state of the art in-dash system from them with the addition of a MagicGate Memory Stick slot, and an auxiliary input to cover any portable connectivity needs. Sony's "G-Protection" even allows for encoding to complete if the engine ignition is shut off.

Cruchfield is selling these bad boys for $1,499.99. Slashdot's got lot of community feedback on the new deck themselves which is worth checking out.

This deck looks so damn money.. I had to comment on this article after I wrote it and say it heh

I seen these in the latest Crutchfield catalog. They are sweet! I could imagine putting this in my car... since this unit would be worth more than my car

This thing is pretty sweet, but that is big money. I can just connect my nomad 3, heh.

WOW. that's fucking $$$

if only i had 1500 usd for a car....

i fail to see the point, personally.
and its actually pretty ugly looking. teal? come on

Only 10 gb wow!

Only 10Gigs for 1499?? lmao damn and I thought the iPod was inflated. I peeped this thing out a while ago and like Your-Mom said I rather buy a nomad 3 and connect it to car via line out/cassette adapter or radio adapter (half the price twice the storage n options). Of course the thing would only be 600 if anybody else were to make the damn thing but Sony's name of course adds another 800 bucks to the equation

Of course you could use the 1499.99 and buy a laptop computer to permanantely keep in the car . Too costly for only being able to play audio imo. Also whom cares about the Magicgate Memory Stick availability?

if anyone's shopping for a mp3 headunit, i just bought a Kenwood KDC-X859. i've had it for about a month and IT ROCKS.. it's 500 clams, but i think it's worth every penny (crutchfield listed it for $499, found it at Tweeter for $479). it plays regular cd's (of course), CD-R's AND CD-RW's filled with your mp3's - it recognizes practically any bitrate you can encode an mp3 with, has a pretty cool looking display that will display ID3 tag info (as well as CD text if you make regular CDs and burn them with it). there's lots of visual "screensaver" display options too.

if i had to complain, it's the lack of popularity of the RDS (radio data system - the head unit reads the genre and other info broadcast by stations - you can even find stations based on the genre you're searching for). my complaint is that hardly any radio stations use it! (yet, anyway). i just took a nice drive from Maryland to Georgia, looking forward to using the RDS to find stations as i went. it was worthless. it only found like 2 stations the whole trip. (but, i didn't even make it through one cd filled with mp3's, and i listed pretty much constantly the whole 9 hour trip!) if you're shopping for a headunit, don't let the RDS be a deciding factor... i would have gone with the other Kenwood unit that's very simliar if i had known this. it's slightly cheaper, has a better looking display, and is exactly the same as the x859 minus the RDS (i can't remember the model number).