Hi everyone, it's me again. It's been a while. I hope you're all doing fine and enjoying good sounds :-)

I need to replace the head unit in my car. The old one is a Pioneer DEH-80PRS which I bought years ago and have been moving from car to car because I like the sound of it. Interestingly I see that it's still being sold and Pioneer describe it as "Competition grade" in their advertising blurb (whatever that means!) so one option is to replace like with like but although I like the sound of it there are one or two things that annoy me. For example, the user interface is terrible - only being able to select next/previous album and next/previous track is fine when you have a multi-CD unit connected but incredibly frustrating if you have an SD card with 200 albums on it (in FLAC format obviously!)

I don't spend enough time in the car these days to warrant a real high end solution with external amps and the like - plus my wife and I are expecting twins so I know money is going to be tight for a while and I don't want to feel like I've prioritised my audio habit over the well-being of my unborn children - so I'm looking for a decent quality head unit I can use as it is.

As there's nowhere I can go to listen to and compare several head units in a car-like audio environment the obvious temptation is to stick with what I know and buy a decent Pioneer head unit such as the AVH-Z9200DAB. I can get this for £499 this weekend as it's "Black Friday" and it certainly meets all my requirements (it can play CDs, has USB inputs and also has Android Auto support which is nice as I don't have a satnav so it will occasionally be useful to be able to use Google Maps from my Android phone via the screen in the stereo). However, this unit also has a ton of features I don't care about (e.g. the ability to be able to play DVD movies, HDMI inputs, outputs for screens for rear seats etc) so I can't help but think that there ought to be cheaper head units out there that meet my needs. I don't trust user reviews on on-line retailers sites because most don't seem to know good audio quality from bad so I wondered whether anyone here has any recommendations?

My car has a non-standard fitting for the head unit but it's larger than double-DIN so both double and single DIN adapters are available for it.

Cheers,

Simon.