well I finally got my phatbox installed. Adding the CD harness wire was a pain in the butt especially having to remove the wires that the XM harness is using. Removing pins from the connector block without audi tools can be done but is neither obvious nor documented. The instructions from Phatbox neglect to mention that the long brown wire in addition to the shorter 8 colored wires, must also be installed as per audi instructions that come with the harness. Phatbox install manual describes the 8 wires correctly but leaves out the brown. Without the long brown one, there is no power to the phatbox! doh!

Anyway the phatbox interface is cool and annoying at the same time. You use the CD selector buttons to change modes. The modes and fixed menus are spoken by a female voice. Tones are used to indicate when you go from mode menu, into a song, or back.

The PC end of this equation generates and records voice prompts for titles, genres, albums etc. Unfortunately it isn't very good at pronounciation so don't search for albums, genres or whatever, with guests in the car, you will get laughed at, and have to explain what the deal is.

While a song is playing you can press "Scan" and the two of them, female and male, have a go at announcing the MP3 ID tag of the song. The female announcer has some kind of weird accent already. Eastern european or something. The male is PC speak, so is like the governor of california after a line of cocaine.

If your mp3s have no tags, then all this announcement stuff is a waste of air time. So you gotta tag your mp3s if they are not. Filenames are not useful or used as far as I can tell.

Sound quality is great. I don't see a problem with that. Since the audio system is not exactly audiophile quality in the first place, you won't know if its CD or MP3 in a blind test.

the cart seems to be fetched once every 5 or so seconds, so I think the head on the drive is less likely to bounce. Not as good as ipod as far as buffer goes, but ok for G forces in a luxury car. I think if you mount the phatbox as per instructions the disk head will only suffer from sideways g forces not possibly larger vertical Gs. Something to think about.

The phatbox itself is too big and heavy for what it does IMO. I can't believe it needs those silver wings for heat. if so, they used the wrong processor. If not, its a huge waste of space and weight.