Rob writes: Don't forget we're talking about IASCA SQ competition here. CD-ROM drives usually have lousy audio quality - many of these guys wouldn't think twice about spending $1000 on a CD transport.

You'd only go for the CD-ROM if you were getting digital-out and running the bits into EMPEG. If you've got a PC, outside the car, that rips a CD and emplodes the music into your EMPEG, then that's potentially compliant with IASCA rules. It's not real-time, which may cause the judges some grief (they walk up to your car and it takes you 10 minutes to rip and emplode a 60 minute disc).

This actually brings up a third possibility relative to my original list.

I presume some trunk-mounted CD changers have digital out, where the D/A occurs in the head unit. If you could reverse-engineer this digital out and then (somehow) feed it into the EMPEG, then you'd be home free. This would likely involve some hardware hacking (adapting whatever proprietary standard or even plain SP/DIF to Ethernet so the EMPEG can read it) and some software hacking (so the EMPEG could stream bits in from the Ethernet and feed them through the EMPEG's normal EQ and D/A).