Old school Pioneer head unit, should I or should I not???

[YakkoWarner]

I always liked Pioneer units. I had one (badly installed by barely-post-highschool myself) in a 1984 Jeep that was rock solid. It was old enough that it was just AM/FM/CD - no bluetooth or front aux or USB. I still have the Jeep and the Pioneer didn't power on last time I had it running (last year) - but I fully suspect my dodgy inexperienced wiring of long ago is more at fault just no time to investigate yet.

I have a Sony unit which I am happy with in my smaller Ranger truck (which was transplanted out of a different car that died). The sony unit has to be at least 15 years old at this point and its still rocking. No bluetooth but it has a front-panel USB port that you can just stick a flash drive full of MP3 into and go.

My Suburban came with a very low-end Dual unit (comparable unit at Wal-Mart sells for $20.00 a couple years ago). It works OK...has no AUX in on the front but actual line input on the back - no bluetooth and its pretty anemic on power and headroom. I know I have a torn rear cone on one of the rear speakers - when I repair that I might advance to something a little higher quality.

I have a bass box with attached amps which I purchased from a co-worker decades ago. That has just been sitting under a side table in my living room because none of my vehicles had room for it - which should not be a problem in the Suburban. The active crossover was noisy though. If I want to resurrect that system I'd need a new crossover and it would have seriouly benefitted from a dedicated equalizer as well.

 

[Frankenchevy]

Taking into consideration that your dash is already cut—my vote would be yes if you only want to play cassettes and the radio, but no if you want to play digital media and care about sound quality.

If I’m going to pull the OEM nostalgic radio out for something aftermarket, I’m going to go all the way so I can listen to hi-res files on hard wired device with dedicated DAC chips. I am not a fan of mp3s or Bluetooth let alone the tape deck/aux adapters or fm frequency generators.

Don’t get me wrong, I really like old radios, but because of nostalgia. That all starts to change when you have wires coming out of it and a smart phone hooked up.

What might also be a fun project is building a custom boom box with your cassette deck and some decent speakers to listen to your cassettes in the shop.