This morning I mentioned the new high-end Pioneer in-car nav device that sold for $1,600. That’s a lot of money for a car stereo to most of us. Thankfully, Pioneer has also announced a couple other nav units that are significantly cheaper, but not cheap by any means.

The two units are the Pioneer AVIC-X710BT and X910BT. Both units are dual din car radios with integrated navigation, stereo tuners and more. The navigation software offers several map view modes, simulated highway signs, and 3D icons for hotels and more.

Pioneer has made some of the coolest car and home stereos around for a long time. When I was a kid, my day bought a new Pioneer stereo that cost him $500, which was big money back in the day. I promptly broke the turntable trying to scratch and spent a week or so being grounded. Ah, the good old days.

Pioneer is a bigger name in home theater and in-car electronics than home stereos today. The company has announced a slick new double DIN head unit that is the top-of-the-line the company offers. The Pioneer AVIC-Z110BT has a 7-inch motorized touchscreen that covers up the CD/DVD player and radio.

There are lots of iPod accessories on the market today and the bulk of them may work with the iPod, but they are not iPhone compatible. That means when you plug them in you get that message on your iPhone screen saying you can’t make calls.

Pioneer has announced a new line of A/V receivers that are designed to work with both the iPhone and the iPod touch. The VSX-819AH, VSX-919AH and VSX-1019AH receivers are all certified for the “Works with iPhone” and “Made for iPod” line of products.

Some new Pioneer receivers were caught talking at CES 2009 about how they want to hook-up with iPods and how they require Apple’s standard USB data cable to do so. The VSX series receivers won’t kill you in the wallet too badly, and they have features that I’m sure you will want, including out-of-the-box compatibility with iPods.

Just hook up your iPod or iPhone to the USB jack in front of the receiver and you’re ready. All you need to do is kick back, listen and check out the album art. The receiver remote also offers full control of your iPod, but surprisingly,(This may hurt sales) there’s no support for playing video off your iPod except for the VSX-919 and VSX-1019AH, the two models on the high end of the budget-minded VSX line.

If you think that the current Blu-ray disc is the best there is, think again. Pioneer has unveiled its 16-layer optical disc that can store a huge 400GB worth of data. The Pioneer disk is based on Blu-ray Disc (BD) with an added breakthrough in material of reflective layers.

The specs of the pick-up head of the disc are the same as those of blank BD discs. That means that the Pioneer discs can be read on BD players that are now on the market. Pioneer will release its read-only (ROM) 400GB discs from 2008 to 2010, while rewritable 400GB discs will make their appearance between 2010 to 2012 and the 1TB capacity disc should show up in 2013.

Pioneer is offering a new line of products that should score big with DJs. In the old days you had to lug around crates of heavy records, but that’s not the case anymore thanks to technology. Their backs are grateful. These days being a DJ is much easier, but the life of the DJ is about to get better still thanks to the MEP-7000, unveiled today at NAMM.

The 4.3-inch LCD screen is the central hub and command center. Two OLED screens help with the functionality of the DVD mixer with pitch, playback and position information. It also has dual DVD drives and USB adapters that make it compatible with everything from MP3 players to flash drives to hard drives. If you want to expand the command center ability, just plug a PC into the unit and the PC and will cooperate with the other software.

Pioneer Electronics is now making available a mother of all in-car navigation systems which could easily make you crash as you fiddle with features. The Pioneer AVIC-N4 is priced at around $1,600.

The Pioneer AVIC-N4 is an in-dash DVD based navigation system which offers detailed mapping and guidance for the entire United States, Canada, Alaska and Hawaii utilizing two regional DVD ROM discs. Pioneer outlined features in this unit as including “nearly 12 million points of interest, XM NavTraffic integration, voice prompting, telephone number search, CD, DVD and compressed audio playback, iPod audio and video integration and expanded Bluetooth capabilities including wireless audio streaming.”