[schwinn]

"Bluetoof" - love it!

My car came with a Pioneer EX501, which I actually like pretty well. It's not perfect (I hate that there's no volume KNOB) but it works well otherwise. The only concern I have is that there appear to be a lot of direct-wires to the speakers (copper)... so I'm not sure what they REALLY did back there. For now, I'm leaving it alone as it works well enough, but I would certainly think the optical-adapter route is the better way to go... I may try restoring mine to that setup, assuming the PO didn't remove the amps and such.

The only complaint I have is that because I'm not using the BOSE amps, the equalization is lost, so the speakers love to distort easily. It's one of the many reasons I hate blows-speakers. So, the EQ had to be set to "voice" to boost the mids while reducing the lows, as the speakers would distort VERY easily otherwise. Using the optical adapter should preserve the factory EQ and prevent this from happening, I imagine.

I'm thinking I need to replace the speakers with better ones, as blows-speakers don't work well without their custom amps and EQs.

 

[schwinn]

Capacitive vs resistive - yeah, gloves are always the issue between them. However, there are options to provide capacitive response with gloves these days as well. You simply need a bit of electrical conductivity from your finger inside to the outside of the glove. You can even buy silvered thread (metallic thread) which can do this. I had done that in the past, and simply stitched in like 5 passes of that thread, and that worked quite well with gloves...

 

[schwinn]

No argument there... I never used an off-the-shelf one, but my silver-thread version worked great on my cellphones... because I could feel the touch point and it was well-conductive as well.