Count me in @doubleclutch. We have an audio system in every room of the house excluding bathrooms and every one will sound better then those in a car. The attempt to make sound better in a car by making it louder has long been held by the neophytes. The dynamic range of a CD, one of it’s greatest advantages, is compressed automatically in most car CD players. This is as much for safety as practicality. The difference between the lowest and the loudest sound on a well made CD becomes unlistenable in many cars. Low volume notes are drowned out by ambient noise in the average car and louder volume becomes way too loud and intrusive and a detriment to safe driving without compressing this range. This falls right into the mp3 hands so well, the difference between a CD and a well executed copy in mp3 though obviously different is less defined as it used to be. In some systems in terrible car environments I have heard using OEM speakers, the difference is decernable easily, only when the car is still and motor shut off. Why bother then ?
@keith: An external DVD drive would only work if the stereo had the software to recognize the device you plugged in and know how to manage it. It very likely doesn’t. CDs and DVDs use a different file system than what is encoded on your flash drive. In fact, on a lot of stereos that will handle flash drives, you can only use drives formatted with “FAT” or “FAT32” file systems, not “NTFS”, if you’re chosen to format your flash drive with it.
Just a though, how about a portable CD player and plug it in through the aux port?
@dagosa, You make a good point about dynamic range. I have an '07 car with no aux. port in the stereo, so I listen to CDs. Much of my listening is classical CDs that use far more dynamic range than typical rock/pop material does, and it is frustrating at times. You can’t hear soft sections over the road noise, and loud sections dang near blow you out of your seat. As I do not have an aux. port, I haven’t tried mp3s in the car. As mentioned earlier, I rip mp3s from my CDs at the 256 bit rate instead of the standard 128 bit rate, and they sound pretty good through my headphones when I’m walking or working around the house. I have a fairly high-end system with a VERY good Rotel CD player and Paradigm speakers, and someday when I’m really bored, I may plug my mp3 player into it and compare it with the actual CDs. I’m sure there is a difference, especially given the quality of my CD player, but I doubt I could appreciate it while driving my car. Another thing I’ll say about mp3 players and iPods, I don’t like earbuds, as they tend to sound rather strident. I have Grado headphones that are very nice, but even my $20 sony headphones sound much smoother than most earbuds do.
If you rip CDs at a decent bit rate, it will take a pretty good ear to tell the difference. That and there are other more lossless formats you can try, but your car stereo will probably not understand how to play them.