I am in the process of gathering pieces to form a more SQ based setup, and would like to eliminate having to flip through cd's all the time. With high capacity portable hard drives out there running off just usb power (wd my passport, for example) and lossless .WAV files it would seem like an ideal solution is available. However, I cannot seem to find a head unit geared towards SQ that has unlimited usb recognition. My google searches come up with useless info. I wonder if anyone here knows of or has experience with such a beast. I was leaning towards the deh-p800prs (man is it sexy) until I read elsewhere that it only has like 4gb recognition(with a separate adapter, nonetheless).

Any ideas?

Good question as I have been wondering the same thing.

What about a carputer, with a high-quality external DAC, set to play FLAC files? Then you'd have to run an outboard processor to get Xover, time alignment, EQing and all the stuff on the line level audio side, but you'd have a platform to do basically anything you wanted digitally.

What about a carputer, with a high-quality external DAC, set to play FLAC files? Then you'd have to run an outboard processor to get Xover, time alignment, EQing and all the stuff on the line level audio side, but you'd have a platform to do basically anything you wanted digitally.

At twice the price and 4 times the installation space.

That would be an excellent solution, however more time, money, and space than I am willing to devote to it. Maybe just have to go with a few flash drives, I just read that it takes about 5 seconds (or more) per GB to index for a pioneer (not sure about others). For 320GB that would be over 25 minutes (is my math right, jeesh) before you could start listening.

Another thought to consider is Music DVD's.

I'm in the process of burning most of my FLAC to one right now.

If you have a DVD player, than you can play this.

4.7GB in my IVA-W205 is nice...

Thanks for the input everyone. It looks like the 800 with the ub100 should work after all.

Found a pretty in depth discussion of it here:

http://www. mp3car.com/vbulletin/car-audio/93542-pioneer-cd-ub100-usb-adapter.html

Seems to only problem that there may or may not be is poor information display.

Also a little delay due to indexing when the unit is turned on (no mention of anything as bad as the 25 minutes I feared).

Seems like a reasonable trade-off for such a massive music library with no fumbling with CDs while at a light.

Sweet.

http://www.mp3car.com/vbulletin/car-audio/...sb-adapter.html

my friend just did a setup with a kenwood single din and spliced his own power (HDD wasnt able to fully run with the lower amps the kenwood usb had) he loves it and said longest wait time so far has been ~30 secs