Ha ha. Well, the question for me regarding car audio is not "how great is it?" but "Is it adequate? Audiophile quality in a noisy car is absurd. People are dumping all this money into it. What a scam.
The OEM radio in my 2000 Sonata, the one that turns itself on when I hit bumps, is a top-end model, the H935. Like every car stereo with CD, it's designed to damage the compact disks. I'm getting more un-fond of it the more I learn the thing. It's got a vertical CD changer -- the kind that I'm certain will self-destruct. And the tape section that I really want has no Dolby (all commercial music cassettes were recorded with Dolby encoding); Dolby tapes played back without Dolby sound ratty. So, let's see: the CD stinks and the tape stinks. And this stereo's damn tall in order to accomodate the CD changer that's unwanted and will break. I think it's called a "double DIN" profile.
I'm toying with the idea of ripping it out and replacing it with a "Lear Jet" normal DIN stereo that I'd bought from JC Whitney 15 years ago (I lucked out, but you might not). This one has Dolby and a 5-band EQ. When I called Lear Jet, they were incredulous that someone ripped off their trademark: "We haven't made car audio for over twelve years. Where did you say that you bought the thing?" To muddy the waters further, it was made in Korea and imported into the US via Canada. I've often wondered if the buyers at JC Whitney even look at products before putting them in their catalog. (Good story, huh?)
What I'm not clear about is whether it would be possible to install the older car stereo into the Sonata's dashboard neatly or not.
Richard