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Strengths: Excellent Sound, Front Aux Port, MP3/WMA/ATRAC3+, Bright Multi-Color Display, Front & Rear & Subwoofer RCA Preamp Outs, XM & Sirius Satellite Ready, Equalizer w/Presets
Weaknesses: Doesn't Support Playlists, No Track Search (Can be tedious finding MP3 and WMA tracks), Poor Documentation
Summary: The CDX-GT400 replaced a seven-year old failing Alpine 3-disc changer in my Jeep Wrangler. Wow, my factory speakers have never sounded so good. The sound quality is excellent and I really like the XPLOD equalizer preset when traveling down the road in my very noisy Jeep. The ability to change the display color to match your vehicle is a nice feature and the main difference between the GT300 and GT400. The model upgrade was only five dollars more at CircuitCity.com. In addition, the display is very bright and has great contrast. I can read the display even with the top down on a sunny day... something I couldn't do with the Alpine's old green LCD display.
There are RCA preamp outs for a separate front, rear and subwoofer amplifier. The unit can also optionally control two CD changers, but why would you want to when you can burn a couple hundred MP3, WMA or ATRAC3+ files to disc? I personally find Windows Media Player the easiest to use for burning digital music discs. WMP can normalize the sound level and bit rate for each track before burning a disc. One note: Initially, I could only see 40 or 50 songs out of 175 I burned to disc. I figured out that the CDX-GT400 was running out of display memory since each of the singles I was burning was being saved to a separate folder (album). Remember to have WMP save all your single tracks to the root folder unless you are actually recording entire albums. Simply uncheck the default "Use media information to arrange files in folders on the disc" option on the "burn" tab of the options window in WMP11.
My only real complaint is the lack of an alpha search function to find individual tracks out of potentially hundreds that can be burned to a disc. At least the tracks are arranged alphabetically by artist. Since there also doesn't appear to be support for playlists I just set my player to play all tracks randomly. Additionally, Sony's documentation is rather weak. Sony claims on their website that they still don't support WMA playback. Thus, WMA Disc creation is a matter of trial and error.
All in all, the CDX-GT400 appears to be a really solid performer and a good value.
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