"Paul Morgan" wrote in message
...

TBH Sony stuff was never one of my favourite brands for car audio, but I'd
be surprised if it's worse than the factory fit sh1te vauxhall/ford and
the
like put in.

Depends on the maker. The vauxhall units are just rebadged units made by one
of many companies including VDO, Phillips, Grundig and Delco.

Thus far I have experienced tape players made by Grunding and Phillips and a
CD player made by Delco. The quality of the Delco and Phillips seem good,
but the Grundig was apalling.

I've got a Sony MD unit in my Impreza which is only there cos it was up
the
loft doing nothing when I bought the car and I bunged it in to replace the
OE tape deck until I get something decent. It's nowhere near the sound
quality of my Alpine setup in my other car (daily driver so it gets more
emphasis on the sound system than the Impreza which is my "weekend car").
But my dad has a 2001 Vectra with the top-spec head unit and CD changer
(CDR600 or something?) which quite honestly makes the sony sound like a
marvel of engineering. The brochure bleats on about the "10-speaker
system"
etc but quite honestly I'd prefer if they simply left a DIN hole for the
customer to fit a stereo themselves cos the junk they throw in there only
serves as an unattractive door-stop ;-)

Sounds unlucky to me.

This of course isn't confined to VX, he had a 2000 Mondeo company car
before
that with the Fisher-price type CD head unit (you know the one with the
massive buttons suitable for the kiddies to play with) and the SQ of that
was positively awful. I replaced the front speakers on that car to try and
improve things a bit as the OE ones are a marvel of cost-cutting (not a
tweeter in sight) but as they say you can't polish a turd, the sound did
improve slightly but the garbage coming out of the head unit would make
£1k
speakers sound awful.

I had an escort with one of these, but the tape one. It too was pretty grim,
and I didn't even have any media for that funny shaped slot :-)

Sounds like either your sony has a problem, is set up very badly, or they
really have done the unthinkable and produced a head unit so bad it's
actaully worse than mainstream OE stuff. I do find that hard to believe
mind, even for Sony!

This I think was their cheapest MP3 head unit, so maybe they cut the corners
a little too much. I doubt that changing the speakers will help much because
the main problem is background hiss which will only be made worse by fitting
better tweeters.

However, I wouldn't say that it's worse than mainstream OE stuff, but it is
definitly worse than my vauxhall head unit.

The Dervboy.