Phatbox alternatives?

[beckfield]

As much as I love my Phatbox, it will inevitably be necessary to sell my car, and there's no guarantee the PB will work in a newer car.  I'm wondering if anyone knows of alternative systems that do what the PB does.

[jheyerman]

Well you can always put a kenwood deck in the new car, making sure it is compatible with the music keg.  Failing that there is the Omnifi, which has an opensource "firmware" available.  It is a harddrive based player (easily able to upgrade the drive size) with a DIN size controller.  No voice indication, though.  It plays wma and mp3 only, though flac has been in the works for a while.   You need an aux in capability for the car deck (sometimes available thru a CD changer port, or other).  We had the Omnifi in our subaru feeding into a Nak deck - didn't like it nearly as much as the Phatbox/music keg.  Then there is the Rio Car/Empeg - it's a deck that mounts in a DIN slot and has up to two hard-drives in it.  No built in amp, but there was an add-in tuner available.  The two devices have not been produced for years (the Empeg was a very short production run) and are available only via e-bay or user forums, etc.    And of course there is always the Ipod, or other MP3 player - most new cars will have an aux in in the front or some kind of Ipod integration; again in my opinion that falls far short of having a phatbox with 320gb drive and giant gapless FLAC collection.

Cheers.
Jeff

[beckfield]

Thanks Jeff.  That's pretty much the conclusion I've been coming to.  Well, I'm not planning on changing cars anytime soon, so I'll just wait until it's time and see what I can do then.

Thanks.