luxury1

Is there a way to have the radio display the text of the song/artist when playing?

scorchie

If you're in Europe, just activate the RDS feature. It is on the settings menu selected from the radio menu.

-s-

DWP

Or, if you're not in Europe, "no"?

We North Americans should probably be grateful for how advances in consumer electronics are thoroughly field-tested in Europe and Asia before we get them. They say that a stroll through Tokyo's Akihabara District is like a time-travel journey two or three years into the future of the American consumer electronics market. Somehow, I don't feel all that grateful.

scorchie

Well ... he doesn't indicate where he's from, and statistically it's more likely than an E-class driver is from Europe.

If he's in the US, the answer is a lot more complex... but has been covered before.

Some of the things I really like about Akihabara is that after the stores close, you can find a lot of people setting up their own "flea market" tables on the corners, selling off all their "old" stuff ... probably to finance the upgrade to new things. You can pick up a lot of neat things pretty cheap, as long as you're not needing the "latest & greatest".

p.s. I leave my RDS off most of the time because it seems none of the Mercedes OEM radios let you control RDS-text and "best signal" feature separately, and in the SF Bay Area a lot of "best signal" data is transmitted erroneously. So my presets end up taking me to stations that I don't want to hear.

-s-

ATS

RDS has been around a lot longer then that. I bought a Kenwood home AMP (North American) version in 1997 and this has RDS.

It doesn't make sense why it isn't inlucded here..

scorchie

Yeah... well I could see the improper implementation here around San Francisco causing a huge support issue at dealers. People would come in thinking something is wrong with the radio, but in fact the problem is with the broadcasters. Until the broadcasters can clean up their act, it might be wise to not tackle the issue.

As an example, if I have preset #2 set to 94.6 (fictitious station number), and I press the button to go to station 2, sometimes it will go to 101.8 (again fictitious) because 101.8 is broadcasting bogus RDS info. It seems that many stations owned by the large broadcasting companies are getting "cookie cutter" implementations of RDS, where the installers are "forgetting" to change some of the settings. Apparently this has been an issue for the last year or two as stations have turned on RDS only to turn it off within a few days. Then it has been up and down on various stations over the last couple years. A couple years ago some of the RDS data was so bogus it was causing radios to lock up! It's poor design on the part of the tuner designers that the data could cause a crash, but it also shows poor implementation methodology.

-s-

Brav

Both my M3 and my 2001 Audi (for gods sake) had RDS (audi called it RBDS) and worked fine here in so cal. never an issue. it pisses me off MB hasn't integrated it for NA

Barry45RPM

My '02 DeVille DHS had it, but very few radio stations here in the NY Metro area use it, or use it for anything more than to display their call sign & a greeting that never changes. We're not missing much by not having it turned on in our cars.