Digital player for truck suggestions

What are you using now at home to play your music collection?

What is your music collection? Mp3s? CD Rips?, iTunes Downloads? Hi-Res Downloads? Any DSD tracks? Or will you just be streaming via a cellular device (and using up data on your dataplan)?

Have you thought about how you’re going to transfer the music into the player?

Does the truck also have an aux input jack?

Bluetooth is okay and convenient, especially when it’s your phone because the music mutes when you get/make a call. No reaching for a mute when the phone rings. Safer. Some want better audio quality than what bluetooth provides but in a vehicle bluetooth audio quality may be good enough.

A player separate from your phone is also nice when you can let whoever is riding shotgun be the DJ. And you dont have to hand over your phone with its personal info.

If you’re an iTunes user like me, an iPod Touch makes sense. It has both bluetooth and an audio output. It syncs easily with your music library and offers models with varying memory capacity so you can load up thousands of songs. Since it also has wifi you could stream through your phone if its configured as a hotspot. (Again, data cap issues.)

It’s all good man. There are some sweet players available at your pricepoint. And Pono and A&K have excellent reviews, among others like Fiio, Cayin, Sony, Pioneer, etc.

Good luck and let us know what you decide and why.

Thanks for the reply. My serious listening is on the downstairs system: more and more vinyl and a static number or so of cd's.

The upstairs system is more casual - streaming from my phone; the occasional cd in the blue-ray player. I have about 200 tunes on my phone. I haven't bothered ripping any cd's onto my macbook pro yet. Now have I taken advantage of any download codes from the newer vinyl I've bought.

yes, the truck will have an aux jack as well as a USB.

I'll be looking for high quality files in my vehicle. I do serious listening when I drive, too. Not as serious or engaging as late-night sessions, but pretty intense.

So, my question to you is what is the car stereo you are considering?  Since you claim to want as high fidelity as possible in your truck, you really need to consider what DAC will be used.  That is a variable that you can control and need to consider.

Unless your truck is a 100k SUV, odds are the factory stereo with bluetooth has your typical crummy dac.  On the other hand, an aftermarket Alpine or Rockford has a much better DAC.  If you are going aftermarket, then bluetooth is better quality and easy.  If you are using a factory stereo with aux input, something in the lines of the Astell & Kern would be my first choice of quality in a car.

@elevick I would probably aftermarket both the car stereo and speakers. The company offers a $500 Bose 7-speaker upgrade package, but I doubt I would be happy with that And would be happy to spend more if it got me more.

And no $100K SUV; we're looking at a $32K pick-up at most. 

@simao

Start by ripping some CDs into an ALAC or AIFF format into iTunes on your Mac. Stay with AIFF or ALAC format because FLAC isnt compatible with iTunes. Pick your favorite CDs.

Sync them to your phone and play them via either bluetooth or with the audio/audio adapter on your iPhone depending on the iPhone model. Enjoy for awhile knowing you’ve spent zero $ to do this so far. Not counting the truck stereo. :)

Maybe get a Tidal HIfi subscription and use Tidal’s download feature to add music  to your phone via home wifi for playback later. This is a great way to listen to music not in your library. Heck, you could bag the CD rips and just do this but I’ll bet there’s an artist or two whose music you like who isn’t on Tidal. So there’s that.

Then, think about a player with lots of memory that’s compatible with Tidal and wifi and will hold a lot of your rips and Tidal tracks. An iPod Touch with, like, 128G of memory. Maybe something else but it has to have an operating system compatible with adding streaming apps like Tidal and plenty of memory.

But right now, you have everything you need to get started. Except, maybe, the connecting cable/adapter to the aux input.

Keep on trucking baby.