We went with floating ground because it gave superior noise isolation from the digital circuitry.

The grounding cables use gold plated RCA's which are pretty much the same electrical spec as the metal bodied connectors on the car mount - they just don't look as nice. The signal cable in the grounding leads, although thin, it very high quality hifi rated cable. You can rig up your own ground tap if you prefer, though.

The in-car outputs have better noise isolation than the home outputs, so if you have noise it's probably due to a ground loop problem or something similar. Connecting the grounding cables at the player end is, in most cases, a bad move.

Regarding the user interface, no other head unit has ever had to provide access to a hierarchical playlist and database search facilities. We don't think that front panel controls would help much either - we're looking much further ahead in technology terms. Watch this space.

In the mean time, the steering wheel remotes provide a very convenient method for control. Mike has already implemented basic support for a Kenwood model, which was mentioned on here some time ago.

The serial connector on the cage is female to isolate the 12V pins from the car chassis. Of course we didn't expect that the connectors would turn out to be turned pin with accessible conductors but it was too late to change it at that point. You can get a gender convertor from pretty much any electronics store for a few dollars.

Rob