You can get car radios that are FM/AM/CD that will play MP3's. The one in
my car will do all of these but not play MP3's. There are many models of
cars being sold with standard FM/AM/CD car radios that will now play MP3's.
MP3
is just another standard that requires its own type of decoding. Many of the
new CD and DVD players for home use will play MP3's.

As for the satellite radio, I would not want this myself. I like to hear the
local news and traffic reports when going around. I also like our local
rock and jazz stations. With XM radio, you pay and just get music. Because
of the quality of most of these radios, and the way that they compress the
signals, I found them to have some artefacts to my perception when
listening. I personally would not go to the bother of doing a detailed test
on one of these. Another thing, in my personal opinion, I don't think the
subscription fees for satellite radio are worth for what I would be getting.
For the amount of time that a person spends in their car, or even to listen
to radio at home, I think these fees can be put for something more useful.

--

Where you went for your radio, I have to say that the salesman is not really
an idiot, if you know what I mean. He wants to make his commissions. He
probably gets paid mainly on his sales. If he can sell you a subscription
for the XM service, he and his employer will have a continuous commission
for each month your are paying for a period of up to 1 year (from what I
have read).

Many of these services pay the vendor a commission for the sale, and then a
commission for each month that the subscriber stays with his plan. This is
how it works over here with the sales of satellite TV and telephone
services. I the area where I am located, our telephone company pays the
vendor about $15 for each contract subscription that they sell. They then
get about 3% up to about 10%, depending on the type of contract of sale, of
the subscriber's payments for up to one year as commission of sale. The
dealers usually split this with the employee who did the sale. I know of
some salesmen who have many hundreds of these types of sales under them.
They are making a good income from this alone.

I have seen situations where the salesmen will lie about the availability of
a product, because he wants to make a bigger commission from the one that
the already has. Or, he does not have the one you want in stock, and he is
too anxious to sell you another type that he has in stock.

In your case, I am very sure that the salesman wants to suck you in to
taking the services so that he can make extra cash for himself, and have
more points from his employer. If he is the owner or a partner in the
establishment, he probably even makes more for himself. There are many
stores where I will not go in to because of the pressure to buy from them.
They come after you like hungry dogs!

When purchasing at any store, make sure that you understand their return
policy. This is important in case you buy something, and you are not happy
with it. Always check out a number of places for the same type of item
before putting down your money for it. Carefully compare prices and options
available for what you are buying.

--

Greetings,

Jerry Greenberg GLG Technologies GLG
=========================================
WebPage http://www.zoom-one.com
Electronics http://www.zoom-one.com/electron.htm
=========================================


"SEVEN SEVILLE" wrote in message
...
Looking for an MP3 player for my recently acquired truck I went to the local
electronics store which shall remain nameless. I asked the the car stereo
guy
(just last week he was working the television department) about MP3 players
and
he showed me a few and told me all this riff raff and suggested that I would
be
happier with XM radio. I was like WTF, i outta just stick with the stock
AM/FM
that's in there right now. Not much difference between XM and FM you know,
they even had a sample in the showroom and you can hear the compression
artyfacts.

Does any of you own an car MP3 player?

Who makes it?
How much did it cost?
How well does it play MP3's?
How does the FM tuner come in?