After working on broken doors and door handles for two weeks, I decided to switch things up and replace the van’s stereo. There are a hundred more important projects to do, but after two weeks of frustrating repairs, I was in the mood to work on something I understood.

While browsing Amazon I found a bunch of stereos under the “digital media” label. These stereos do not play physical media like CDs or cassette tapes; instead, they are designed to stream content from phones using Bluetooth and play media from USB sticks and Micro-SD cards. (It’s also a radio.) I found several of these devices in the $100 range and randomly selected the Absoso CA-70BT, which sells for $92. The stereo includes a remote, a set of steering wheel controls, and a backup camera.

Installing the stereo was not simple, and once again my buddy Jeff came to my rescue. It took us two days to get everything working, and we still have a couple of minor loose ends to tie up. As I joke in the video at the bottom of this post, the instruction manual felt like it was originally written in Chinese, translated (poorly) to English, and may be for a different radio. The majority of the instructions were confusing; one step referred to wire colors that weren’t present on my radio. There were no instructions for wiring the backup camera at all — we had to figure that out by watching YouTube videos. Perhaps most frustrating of all is that the stereo is not a standard double-DIN size. It’s probably 1/2″ too tall to fit into a standard double-DIN opening. Even after using a Dremel to enlarge the opening, the radio still sticks out toward the top.

The flipside is that for $92 you get an awful lot of technology. Just a few years ago people were building car PCs that didn’t have as many features as this unit and cost 5x as much to build. The stereo instantly paired with my phone over Bluetooth, and I was able to stream music to the stereo and make phone calls (I had to purchase a microphone separately). Once we wired it up correctly the backup camera worked as advertised. According to Amazon, the Absoso supports a variety of both video (Real Media, DVD (VOB), VCD (DAT), MP1 and MP2, DIVX and XVID, MP4 and MKV) and audio (MP3/WMA/WAV/FLAC/OGG/APE) formats. After inserting a USB stick full of videos, the device began to play them on its 7″ 1080p screen. The unit does seem to stretch 4:3 content to fill the screen, but I’m guessing not everyone tests their new HD media player with 1980s Saturday morning cartoons.

Despite all the radio’s features, I find it difficult to recommend. Between Jeff and I, the two of us have easily installed two dozen car stereos over the years, and this one was the most complicated. Even with the purchase of an additional wiring harness the poorly translated instructions were confusing at best, and for many people the non-standard size would be a deal breaker. Installing this stereo is not recommended for amateurs. That being said, if you can get it installed, it certainly packs a lot of features into a $92 package. For those who don’t carry around physical media, these types of devices are the perfect solution.

In the video below I go into more details, show off some of the radio’s features, and some of the wiring difficulties we encountered with the backup camera.