One thing that I will say that bugged me about the car was the premium sound system in the car. If anyone has ever had a Porsche with a Becker stereo you know what I’m talking about. The DB7GT with Premium Sound option (Invoice price over $1000) just didn’t do the job. These Becker stereos are not so intuitive and have the odd representation of symbols and such. That all being said the car has a rear mount CD changer and the Becker control head in the car has a Cassette player hidden behind the face plate. Yep, 2003 with a cassette, not the single slot CD player. After some searching on EBay came across someone else that was not so thrilled with the Becker, and removed theirs from their car. Ended up being Nick Cages car radio for a DB AR1 (I think that’s the model) which was a similar radio but with navigation and the Cassette player removed and swapped for a single CD. Becker and navigation, think about a single DIN sized radio with an arrow giving the directions. Bad. So while I did buy it I decided not worth the trouble to put in the car.
Enter the Solisto!
The Solisto is a really slick device that plugs into your existing harness (replacing the external CD changer) and allows you to put 99 songs on 10 simulated CD’s. All in the size of a pack of cigarettes. It is controlled just like an external changer so the control in the car does not need to be changed! This is made in Germany where their seems to be a proliferation of Becker radios (They have other radio support as well). It can also control a iPod, but not sure what the point is, but I guess it could be useful.
Hook up was as simple as unplug the the external CD changer (remove CD’s first!) and plug into the Solisto unit. That’s it for the installation!
The next step is to use the simple PC based software to load up the 10 Virtual CD’s. Each of these can have 99 songs, so you can have a total of 990 MP3’s at your finger tips. You then copy these to a USB Flash key and that gets plugged into the Solisto. Close trunk, start car, play lots of music!
Audio quality is very good, and you will not run out of music for a long time. Let’s just say that I can listen to Johnny Cash for a long long time without touching the radio. I’m still up in the air if I will swap out the radio for the ‘upgraded’ Nav unit, but the Nav is so bad on the Becker, the only reason I would do it would be to play CD’s, and even that is not worth it since the phone does it all now. So now a days better to find something that does Bluetooth to the Becker, but I really have not looked since I have so much music on the Solisto.
Awesome product! Some picture of the Solisto is below, and you can find their site right here – Solisto
Image Gallery Below
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This was an example of a stamped steel rocker arm on my 427 Chevelle engine. It was a pretty healthy motor, but having no money for roller rockers I was stuck with stamped steel. I Pumped a pushrods regularly through the stock stamped steel rocker arm on my Big Block Chevy. I had to keep swaping these in and out. This was on my 1969 Chevelle SS396
Solisto to Becker Wiring
This is really all you need to do to connect it up. These wires are right off the back of the CD Changer. Plug and Play. The Solisto treats each CD as a 99 track set of songs, and I think you can have 10 CD’s as I recall. A good amount of music. Not quite as nice as having a phone with a real player that shows names and album art but better then a case of CDs.
A little double sided tape on the bottom of the Solisto mounted it on the side of the player was my plan for mounting.