Tim,
I do appreciate your opinion. I was hoping for someone who wanted to stay OEM and was looking for the capabilities of having mp3 CD or 6 disc CD or both. I don't really agree that you can get an "extremely" good aftermarket unit, though. The upper $100's range for aftermarket HU's is by no means crappy, but I think to get what I would see as "extremely good" as far as features, playback formats, and the things I really care about (power, harmonic distortion, frequency response, and signal-to-noise ratio) you would have to spend in the between $350 and much more than $350. I guess I am just testing the waters for this unit. It has very few bells and whistles features wise, but the lack of a built in amplifier, in my opinion, means a lot as far as sound quality.
Kevin,
It is tough to say whether it will plug and play. I can't find any pictures of '03 harnesses or the back of the '03 HU. Unfortunately, I can also not find any posts on how the '03 is amplified. If you could compare your HU plugs to mine (which I tried to get decent pictures of up on eBay) you could at least determine if it would plug in. As far as ampification goes, I also cannot find any concrete information as to whether it will require an aftermarket ampifier.
The one person I know of who may know more about this is FlipTrac_511. I believe he at least tried installing this HU in an '04 with an audiophile system, but then again, the '04 might be completely different from the '03.
I do know that they got rid of the rear seat audio controls in '04, so I honestly doubt that this unit, which was put in in '04 and '05 only, was made to be capable of working with the rear controls.
The backlighting is green.
Hopefully someone with experience swapping their unit with this one (FlipTrac
) could provide some further advice.
strube
