Well I finally made the move and picked up one of these Blaupunkts. WOW what a differnce in sound! I was never happy with the stock system even after the capacitor upgrade, but I am quite happy now. Everything sounds so much cleaner and you can hear distinct elements in the music so much easily withou the distorion in the treble that annoyed me. Now I finally know that the stock speakers and subwoofer can indeed sound good.

Nice thing about the Blaupunkt is that it uses the stock harness so you can hook the thing up in less than 10 minutes! The only modification to be made is in the antenna connection whre you have to have a Euro adapter. There's enough silver on the face of the St. Louis to make it blend into the car's interior very nicely and you can adjust the color of the display to match the dash colors if you wish. I also like the feature where it not only has an iPod connection but also a USB connection for other types of MP3 players. I've noticed these receivers are now being pretty heavily discounted, so this must be a soon to be discontinued unit.

 

Any Pictures?

 

Model number?

 

It's the St. Louis MP56. I think the only real difference between it and the more expensive Memphis MP66 is the Memphis has full color display. I'll get some pics up tomorrow. Also, I haven't tested the USB connection yet to see how well that works, but plan on doing that tomorrow as well. I ran the USB cord behind the side panels to the center console so that it daylights just above the little storage net there on the passenger side. I may need to take it into the glove compartment if this location doesn't work out well, but I think the cable is long enough to work fine there. From what I understand reading the manual, the receiver detects the device attached to the USB as a drive accessible through the receivers on-screen menu.

 

Here's a picture. The screen has an adjustable brightness setting for day and night. This is the day setting at maximum brightness. I've set the color set to match the Crossfire dash lights.

The USB connection woks great, but is a little cumbersome to navigate on screen.

To remove the stock radio you will need the Mercedes type removal tools that go into those slots at the bottom. They can easily be found for well under $10.

 

it looks good

 

where is the iPod connector???

 

It's on a cable that comes out the rear of the unit just like the USB cable. You have to route them into the passenger compartment some way.

 

Can you navigate through the iPod menus via the iPod itself? I had a JVC with iPod connector on another car but was forced to navigate the iPod through the stereo or remote and it was not very user friendly so I ended up using the aux jack instead.

Btw, the Blaupunkt really looks at home there....nice..

 

I don't have an iPod, just a Sansa and an iRiver. Both of those you have to navigate via the receiver through the USB connection.. The receiver also has a SD slot behind the faceplate you access as just another drive. It works with the 2GB cards as I've tested them, haven't checked out the 4 GB SDHD card yet. So far that's working out good for albums I listen to all the time and you can play them all in a mix.

I've experimented with differnt colors on the face. So far there's something close to a black and silver that looks better than the dash light green.

Also, on the look, I like the large round volume/on-off/selector **** that is almost the same size as the HVAC controls.

 

I experimented with some differnt color schemes and think I like this silver-like one the best. The only downside I see to this unit is the face is highly reflective and is tough to see in bright sunlight. The simple black and white color scheme seemed to work the best for that condition.