I'm in the market for a car stereo. I need the stereo itself, speakers, and of course installation. I don't really want to go higher than $600-$700 total for everything. So if you have a knowledge of good car stereos, what do recommend? . What are considered the best speakers? Infinity, Eclipse, Kenwood? Bose? What stereo brand is good? Alpine? Pioneer? Eclipse? Kenwood? Oh and the stereo must have a "line in" jack for my external mp3 player.

Seriously .............

Id say get a receiver that has a MP3 plug in / port and then upgrade your factory speakers to something that you can buy 4 of with the rest of the 600-700 . Then suck on not having the speakers amplified . If you do it yourself and the car has factory amps you might be able to wire in the amps but I doubt you'll find a dealer who will wire the factory amps , unless they have the adapter wiring/kits to do it easy . My Explorer has a Kenwood deck that I built a RCA cluster for so I could hook the Kenwood to the factory Ford system . I still have the stock speakers which suck but with a decent deck and EQ (Sony XE-744) hooked up they sound pretty good . Next upgrade is a full Infinity speaker upgrade . After that Ill get some non-factory amps and then perhaps a sub for the back panel .
Good Luck .

Why not just buy a deck with an Mp3 player built in like I did? It plays regular CDs and Mp3 CDs. I bought the Rockford Fosgate RFX 9000 (pictured Here) for $350 with free installation. I love it -- no problems.

For speakers, IMO there really isn't a "best" speaker. You should head over to a car audio shop and listen to various speakers and find out what you like, as certain speakers will sound better with different kinds of music. It's mostly subjective. I went with the Pioneer TS-A6857s.

I'm also running 2 sony xplod 12" subs inside a nice custom enclosure and a Fosgate amp (forgot which model).

Total cost:
$350 for the deck (w/ install)
$300 for the 2 subs, amp, enclosure (w/install)
$190 for the 4 speakers to replace the factory speakers (installed myself).

$840 for it all and I love the sound. You can, of course, change out different receivers/speakres to drop the price down to $600-700.

FWIW, I run all this in a '97 explorer, similar to Lemondrop.

Get an Alpine head unit and Boston Acoustics speakers.

There was a similar thread last week in Other that may assist:

New car stereo q's

<small>(Just a heads up that this one may eventually be closed as a duplicate).</small>