For the past week I have been using a car system
with 3 MDX-65 changers and an XA-C30 source selector
box. The XA-C30 is mounted in the trunk along with the
changers. Previously, my single MDX-65 was powered
through the Unilink cable, but I had to run an unswitched
battery line back to the trunk to power the XA-C30. The
XA-C30 also requires a power ground connection which
I fastened under a convenient screw in the trunk. Sony
seems (wisely) to have used the shield in the audio cables
for the ground that powers the analog circuitry to prevent
noise from being introduced by the power ground. I bought
3 1-meter (Sony RC-61) Unilink cables to connect the XA-C30
to the MDX-65 units.
Upon auto-detecting the XA-C30, a single digit (identifying
the changer) appeared to the right of the "MD" on the display.
In normal mode, the system will play through all tracks on
all discs in MD1 in order, followed by MD2, then MD3 and
it will then go back to MD1. The disc "+" and "-" keys
function much as expected: MD2 disc 1 follows MD1 disc 6.
However, it does *not* use the RAM buffers to provide
uninterrupted play when switching changers as it does when
switching discs in the same changer. This proved to be a major
disappointment for shuffle mode 3 (where it picks random
tracks from all available changers), causing about 10 seconds of
silence while the display says "LOAD" between *every* track.
The advantage of using multiple MD players is that one can have
much more music "on-line" at a given time; great for long trips!
However, in my opinion, the 10 second interruptions make shuffle
mode 3 rather annoying; so having multiple changers is *not*
that useful if you plan to use shuffle mode. Luckily, most of my discs
are compilations that I recorded, so lack of shuffle is somewhat
tolerable, just disappointing.
Perhaps someone at Sony watches this list and will improve the software
to fix shuffle mode 3 in future releases. My guess is that it would involve
buying a new head unit (BTW I'm using the unilink control part of the RF
adapter with the audio feeding directly into "aux" inputs on my radio) and
maybe a new switching unit...
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