This thread is one of the top hits in Google for "flac car stereo", so forgive me bumping it.
So I read the thread, very amusing i-flamewar going on there.
Let's get the FLAC part out of the way, for my part I have:
* a 1.2TB music collection of 70,000+ tracks all in FLAC
* a home SqueezeBox Transporter and an analog audiophile setup (costs more than the car)
* a portable Cowon J3 player paired with Grado SR235 headphones
Disk is cheap, I don't care for the space issue... but I do care for the quality issue (at home and on the move). I've spent a lot on a great setup for audio at home, and all I want from a car setup is:
* The convenience of using my existing music collection without me re-encoding it
* No unnecessary drops in audio quality due to the setup (though I concede the shape of a car cabin makes audiophile ideals simply mind-numbingly stupid, that's before you introduce road and engine noise)
* Seamless integration with the car stereo so as to not have to connect and disconnect stuff on every journey
That's it... it's a convenience play, but when you have a collection of 70,000+ tracks then convenience matters a lot.
To the questions of why a manufacturer would add it, let me say 2 things:
1) FLAC is fully open source and doesn't require a license to implement
2) People like myself will spend a disproportionate amount on convenience, to the point that I would step from a GBP 500 unit up to a GBP 1,000 unit without batting an eyelid and I would betray any brand loyalty and try new manufacturers just for this feature
Anyhow... that's all just addressing the prior posts, now onto what I found.
I found the Parrot Asteroid. At least, it's a PC wrapped up as a hands-free and audio system based on Android OS and because Android supports FLAC then in theory so does the Parrot Asteroid.
So there is something out there, but I don't necessarily need a full hands-free, Android system... I prefer simplicity and coming from a UNIX background I like the idea of "do one thing, and do it well"... so I could settle for the Parrot Asteroid quite happily, but I would still like to know if anyone else has a commercially available in-car system that plays FLAC and beyond that has few bells and whistles.
Any informed posts welcome - though I'm sure the flamewar will continue //content.invisioncic.com/y282845/emoticons/wink.gif.608e3ea05f1a9f98611af0861652f8fb.gif