Word! Have owned our E for ~2 weeks and dig it more and more daily.

A friend has kindly offered us a very nice JVC KD-G300 head unit ... Can someone please comment on the compatability of this deck with our 2004 EX? I'm a wiz with duct-tape and a recip. saw so I know it will fit ... My biggest questions are

a) Will it let me control the Sub independently of the volume?
b) Will it support the stock aux port that lives very tidily on the passenger dash?

Cheers, Samo

Welcome to the family, Sam. Unfortunately the unit has one pair of line level outputs and they tak the place of the rear speakers. In other words you would have no sub control other than your standard "bass" control. It looks like they make an aux input cable (sold seperately) which you could modify to use with the existing plug-in. Hope this helps.8-)

Big Al does make house calls:lol:

http://www.eserviceinfo.com/index.php?what=search2&searchstring=KD-G300

Check it... service manual... or so it says

Thanks for your input guys, 'tis great help (but mediocre news !?!) - I'll search for a list of decks, specifically designed to do this ... Man, free is so much nicer than several hundred ... Maybe I'll have a think about how/if I might live with only Bass control ... I'm not an audiophile - and listen to all genres of music (ie including but not specifically bass heavy music) ... how critical is this feature?

... how critical is this feature?

A left and right stereo speaker is really all you need... oh wait:
http://web.mit.edu/dchou/www/images/phonograph.jpg

Point is it's entirely subjective and you'll have to decide, but remember serious audiophiles got along with two really nice speakers just fine for a very long time (when were the first subs marketed? 80s? They didn't catch on til the mid 90s right?). In my opinion the factory sub does not add that much since the factory front speakers handle bass pretty well by themselves and in a car there's so much low-frequency road noise (unless you add soundproofing) that the bass detail is probably getting drowned out anyway. And you could remove the sub, put the LX front pocket in and gain storage space!

If you want to see what your stereo system sounds like without the sub try one of these:
Turn the sub level all the way down on the radio
pull out the radio and disconnect the 8-pin connector that only has three wires on it--that's the sub output.