#97: Head unit

I am now the proud owner of a beautiful new head unit for my car.

Mum and Dad's Christmas present to me was something for my car — Mum later admitted that that was partly to encourage me to actually buy a car, since I'd been planning to for months and still hadn't decided on one. But I bought my lovely car in February, and decided to get a head unit. When my birthday rolled around in May and I still hadn't bought it, though, Mum and Dad decided their birthday present to me was a bigger budget for my head unit.

Side note on my car: I really love it. It's a big five-door family-sized car with a massive boot, and for a first car it's great. Relatively new, electric windows, already armed with an alarm, manual gearbox, a bigger engine than I'm used to, and in really good condition — although, really sadly, it's already been nicked and dinged in a couple of places by careless drivers and (in one instance) by my own careless/overtired driving. :-(

It also came with a Kenwood tape deck but, much as I like Kenwood, a tape deck is frankly useless. Dan and I went shopping for CD head units a couple weeks ago, and finally found a good branded one with more than all the specifications that I wanted, and at exactly my price range — to the dollar. Of course Dan, being Dan, said we could get it cheaper somewhere else, now that I knew what I was looking for. I sighed impatiently, but he was right — after some ferreting around on the internet (ha, ha), Dan found the next model up from the one I wanted, for $20 less. Surprisingly, it was on Ferrit — my opinion of that place is slowly rising, and my opinion of their current free delivery policy is very high indeed.

We placed the order on Saturday night. Since the payment couldn't go through till Monday at the absolute earliest, I was very impressed to receive my beautiful new head unit promptly on Tuesday morning; and Dan installed it for me last night. Ah, it's lovely. I love it so much. And it's so pretty. And it has so many functions — though at least I didn't let Dan talk me into getting the head unit with a two-inch screen to play my videos on!

So I'm very happy. And now, because my new head unit plays ATRAC and AAC tracks (neither of which I've heard of before, but apparently they're smaller and better than mp3s?), I am off to convert my mp3s to ATRAC format.

Life is good.