CES: Car Audio CD Player With Hard Drive/Memory Stick/MP3 Playback

Since our cars are the place many of us spend the most time listening to music, it was inevitable that a company would figure out that it was a smart idea to put a hard disk drive at our disposal while we're behind the wheel. Pioneer's new DEH-P90HDD AM/FM/CD player has a built-in 10 GB hard drive for listening to the myriad of audio formats we've grown to love while we tool down the highway. The unit features a MagicGate Memory Stick player, an integrated Gracenote CDDB Database and Music Recognition Service, MP3 playback, and is XM Satellite Radio ready. Pioneer says the DEH-P90HDD's built-in 10GB hard disk can accommodate up to 200 CDs worth of music. Music can be copied directly from the built-in CD player or over-the-air broadcasts and can be transferred at two different bit rates (132kbps/105kbps) using ATRAC3 compression. The Memory Stick player is intended to enable compatibility between Memory-Stick-ready computers, home audio systems, portable audio and the in-car unit. The player's Gracenote CDDB Music Recognition Service is supposed to automatically provide information including the artist name, song title and CD title for each track that has been recorded to the hard drive. A 256 by 80 pixel display shows 3D images as well as multiple lines of text for visual identification of commonly-used features. The DEH-P90HDD also features a 13-band graphic equalizer, MOSFET50 50 Watts x 4, Hi-Volt outputs (x3), a steering wheel remote, and a detachable face plate. It will be available beginning in January for around $2,000, which may just make you sing the blues in these interesting economic times.