Putting more bump in the CR-V's trunk...

[DanL]

Alright, well here's my view on stereos... take the plunge and go for an aftermarket one. Yeah, they silver and chrome the hell out of the light-up blue and green LEDs and LCDs, but for sound quality, its going to sound a hell of a lot better than your stock headunit. Main reason is because of equalizers and other misc. sound enhancing circuitry - you ever turn off the equalizer on Winamp and say, "hey, where did that quality and fullness go?" I mean, I completely understand where you're coming from aestetically - the chromed out bling on my Pioneer headunit sticks out like Dubya at the DNC in the plain black plastic dash of my Accord - but hey, the thing sounds amazing, and the audio quality is what matters to me. Just be warned - if you're upgrading your headunit but not your speakers, the new unit is most likely going to be able to put out more power than what your stock speakers are rated for, so easy with the volume knob.

If, however, you value aestetics over sound quality (again, I'd say you should value quality), you do have some other options. A friend of mine actually did do the computer-in-the-truck-as-an-mp3-player thing. He bought one of those serial-port LCD units for feedback and hooked up a keypad through the other serial port to change playlists or tracks and such. Lots of custom programming went into this to make it work, as well as quite a bit of hardware hacking. I'd personally just go with the new headunit that plays MP3 cds (I've had the same MP3 cd in my car for the past half-year, and I'm still not tired of it).

A third option you can go for is the radio-frequency cd-players. I used to have one of these in my car before it broke on me (the thing wasn't built to last more than 4 years, it seems). Basically there's a CD-changer mounted in your trunk, a control unit put somewhere in the car, and an LCD with feedback buttons that is mounted somewhere near the dash. The LCD is hooked up to the control unit, which is hooked up to the CD changer in the trunk. The idea is you tell it what to read and then the controller transmits the audio over an FM frequency. With this, you keep your system completely how it is - all you do is tune the radio.

Hope this helps.