Take it from me... Brian's system is the best.

I once thought as you did, that it would be easier to simply steal power from somewhere else and hard-wire the lighting. But now that I've done it "Brian's Way", I can see how much better it is.

Consider the following:

- There are already traces on the display board for the LEDs. To do it your way would require running extra wires of your own.

- Dismantling your player, for example to work on the drives, would become difficult (working around the extra wires). Brian's method is self-contained within the display board itself. Even the procedure for removing the display board doesn't change after doing it Brian's way.

- Under Brian's system, you're using already-regulated power from the display electronics. If you hard-wired the power to something external, you would also have to deal with the voltage regulation, which would needlessly complicate things.

- Brian's system will work in any vehicle, with no modification to the sled wiring. Even if the vehicle doesn't have a dimmer wire or if the dimmer wire is not hooked up.

- Brian's system allows the button LEDs to have a software-controlled dimmer. This allows for some very useful features: 1) Control the brightness level with a menu instead of by messing with hard-wired electronics. 2) Buttons go dim when the player is put into standby mode. 3) Buttons can have different levels of brightness for home and car use.

- The fact that the buttons blink when you press them is not a problem. To me, it looks like a feature, not an annoyance.

What do you gain by hard-wiring it? Okay, the blink goes away and you don't have to solder the SMT resistor pack. But I think hard-wiring it would be just as difficult (if not moreso), and you would lose important features in the process.