What is everyone's opinion the the OEM Infinity Head Unit?

It's made by Becker, who I'm informed supply head units to Mercedes and Porsche. And I know it has plenty of power output. But I've changed my unit due to the one fitted to my car having faulty buttons, which meant I couldn't turn off the traffic announcments amonst other things, but other than that it worked ok. The problem I found was that the sound quality was quite poor. Very muddy sounding bass. The thing is, the one thing I would say was weak about the vehicle package as a whole was the sound system. Yet journalists tend to rate the sound system as "powerful" and leave it at that.

The Clarion head unit I've fitted to my car has a far superior sound quality, the bass is solid and crisp, and not at all muddy like the OEM unit. The treble is fantastic too. This is on MP3s which are not the best quality MP3s I have to admit. I tend to stick with 128kbps when ripping my CDs. I've played one standard CD so far on the new unit, and the sound quality is even better. It's mystifying to me why car manufacturers skimp on the sound systems on occassion. The best system I've had in any of my cars was the Bose system in my Audi A6 Avant. But even that was fairly simple in that it played CDs and had a radio, nothing fancy. There was a lot more car interior space to fill with sound though, and the 7 speakers did a good job of that.

I don't know what the American market is like, but here in the UK, manufacturers and journalists alike rave on about the fact that a car has an iPod connector... which more often than not turns out to be simply a stereo jack port... wow a stereo jack... modern tech at it's best! It's amusing that cars are so stuffed full of safety equipment that boggles the mind, but when it comes to technology that's been around for years on PCs and portable music players they are years and years behind.

Rant over. The point of the thread was to find out if others found the OEM sound system to be a bit dissapointing?