bryanr.org

I've been thinking about ways to use the EVO as a car audio player (augmenting/partially replacing a carpc with dash-mounted touchscreen). What's the best way to get high quality audio from it? Options:

• Headphone Jack. But it's a hassle to connect a cable all the time. And the headphone output on the HTC EVO is almost 1990s-laptop-bad; it's pretty clear that HTC cut corners on the analog filtering. The bass is badly distorted.
• USB. Apparently some head units can mount a smartphone as a USB storage device, and then play audio from it. This approach requires only 1 cable to both charge, and get audio from, the phone. And it can provide high quality given the decoder, DAC, and amp are entirely outside the phone. But, I want to control playback from the phone itself, and don't have (nor want to buy) one of the few headunits that support USB. Finally, the USB storage approach is incompatible with streaming audio over 3G (Pandora).
• HDMI. Might be possible, but still has the cabling problem.
• Phone-as-Wifi-AP: This is not so bad -- allows lossless audio streaming over IP, but, it prevents the phone itself from accessing the Internet via wifi (which is a bummer when parked outside a Starbucks).
• Ad-Hoc Wifi: Isn't supported by Android yet
• Car-as-Wifi-AP: More difficult to implement (most USB Wifi dongles don't support AP mode in Linux; I don't want to add a standalone AP in addition to the CarPC). And it would probably break internet access on the phone, as the CarPC is not a gateway.
• Bluetooth: Connect a $20 USB BT dongle and then use the CarPC as an A2DP SBC sink (or, buy/build a standalone BT DAC). Unfortunately, Android doesn't support A2DP MP3 or AptX, and SBC is a poor codec. But the headphone output on the EVO is so aweful, that a good USB DAC on the CarPC should easily beat it, even after the SBC losses. And this approach doesn't require cabling and doesn't conflict with internet access over wifi.