I've seen the future of rock 'n' roll in cars—and its name is the 2008 Cadillac CTS. Ditto for the future of classical music, hip-hop, and country. Unless Cadillac screws up royally between now and the car's launch in August, the CTS will have the most versatile audio system ever developed for a motor vehicle. I could tell at today's press briefing, just from sitting in the car—parked in an outdoor courtyard at a fancy New York City restaurant—and tinkering with the center stack.
The CTS is Cadillac's small luxury/sport sedan, sent out to do battle with the BMW 3 Series, Mercedes C-Class, Audi A4, Infiniti G35, and Lexus is350. Though it's fully renewed for the 2008 model year, we don't yet know how well the CTS handles driving through mountain passes. But when you're cruising on the highway, nothing is going to beat Cadillac for breadth of audio sources and musical entertainment. Here's why: Cadillac's center-stack design team (the engineers responsible for what goes in the middle of the dashboard) thought it through better than anyone else has so far, and then implemented every possible feature you could want.
In this category, you need solid electronics hardware, to start with. Cadillac teamed up with Bose, which should delight all but the worst of the audio snobs (who think Bose is forty years of hype). The navigation module comes from Alpine, one of my favorites. The hard disk comes from Toshiba, and what's important to us is the 40GB capacity. Roughly half is available for ripping music. (The other half goes for navigation data.)
Satellite radio? XM is included. Line-in jack? Of course. USB socket? Check. iPod compatibility? Part of the USB configuration. Database for music lookup? The latest version. Touchscreen display for ease of use or cockpit control knob for tech buffs? It has both. Plays MP3, WMA, and AAC files off CDs? All of them, and even rips (transfers) MP3 CD data (some cars with hard drives rip only music from the original CDs).
Continued
(Bluetooth is available as a dealer installed option...)
