New audio panel

Begone Garmin GMA 340 audio panel, and welcome PS Engineering PMA 450!  I never thought much about audio panels until I flew with my buddy in his Cessna 210 with a PSE Engineering panel.  The sound quality was so much better, so crisp and clear.  The difference is like a noise canceling headset vs passive, which is to say quite significant!  The other issue I wanted to address was the Garmin 340 has no dedicated inputs for music.  That prompted the prior owner to wire the XM audio into the ADF monitor function.  Not ideal!  I couldn't change the volume for different locations, and it just generally sounded crappy.  

The unit has some nice features, like bluetooth input and dynamic sound where you can set the copilot voice to seem like it's coming from your right side.  All sweet, but my primary motivation was simply better sound quality and it's definitely much better.  It was a simple swap.  I still need to have an avionics shop rewire the music input properly, but I got the radio installed myself in all of 2 minutes.  You just unscrew the hex nut for the 340 and slide it out, and slide in the 450 and screw it in.  Got a great trade up deal from Chase from Avionics Source, whom I also purchased my Avidyne's from.  Great guy/company, highly recommend! Here she is, looking good under the IFD 550.