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This page contains pictures of the installation of a Neo 35 MP3 player in my Mk4 Golf.
The Neo is installed in one of the compartments in the boot. It's a pretty
tight fit and the Neo has to be installed at an odd angle. It is held in place
by blocks of polystyrene. Also in this compartment are a ground loop isolator
and a home made line driver. The GLI is needed to remove alternator whine. I
believe that a fault in the design of the car bay means that the audio ground
and power ground are not correctly isolated, so no amount of careful grounding
of the unit will remove the need for the GLI with this particular revision of
the car bay. I believe that this is fixed in later versions. The home made
line driver boosts the signal from the Neo which is a bit low otherwise. This
means that the volume of the Neo matches that of other sources on the head
unit. Increasing the signal in the wires running to the head unit also
improves the signal to noise ratio and gives a much cleaner sound.
The polystyrene isn't as neat as it might be, but who cares? When the
compartment is closed you'd never know it was there, and the polystyrene does
mean that the hard disk is well insulated from knocks and bumps when driving -
I have had absolutely no problems with hard disk damage. The aluminium box
below the Neo is the line driver, the small black box with white tape around it
is the GLI.
One very small addition I made was to loop a piece of string through
the connector on the cable remote cable. This makes it much easier to remove
the plug without risk of damage. This problem has been avoided on the new Neo
Jukebox by placing the remote connector in a sensible place - on the car bay.
Up front I have a Blaupunkt Hamburg CD70 head unit, with the Neo connected to
the AUX input. Since taking the photo on the left I have changed the LCD
display in the remote to a black-on-grey LCD, similar to those elsewhere in the
car. This is much more readable in bright sunlight. It also has a blue
backlight connected to the interior lighting circuit, although it is not a very
good match for the other blue lights in the car.
One of my issues with the Neo is that there is no DIN sized remote control. The main unit has a DIN sized front, but it is too deep to fit in the dashboard of a Golf (and indeed most other cars). My solution is a remote control mounted on a plate in the spare DIN slot above the head unit.
This photo shows how the remote is mounted. I used a DIN-sized blanking plate
with a hole cut in it. I took the remote apart and shaved a couple of
millimetres off the back panel so that when mounted on the blanking plate the
original screws still reached through to hold it in place with the plate
sandwiched between the front and back halves of the remote. The PCB taped to
the back of the remote is a 12V DC to 125V AC invertor, needed to power the
blue EL backlight. The blue and brown wires on the right are connected to the
illumination circuit.
I have invested a lot of time and money in this installation. Was it worth it? Definitely. For me, this sort of setup is perfect for in-car audio. There is simply no comparison between a 12 disc CD changer and an MP3 player with hundreds of albums and a handful of personal playlists on it.
I do have a few reservations about the unit itself. Many people have described this unit as not being ready for "prime time". I think that this is a fair assessment, but for anyone with a bit of enthusiasm who is prepared to get their hands dirty it is possible to get a very good setup with it. I understand that the Neo Jukebox is a rather more refined product. This is what you get for buying a first generation product from a small company.
It is interesting but perhaps not surprising that none of the big manufacturers are making similar units. I am sure that if they put their minds to it they could create better looking, easier to use and probably cheaper units. I suspect that if big manufacturers ever do catch on they will create products that are limited by SDMI, which may severely limit your ability to make "fair use" copies of music that you have already bought.