Digital player for truck suggestions

Thanks for the reply. My serious listening is on the downstairs system: more and more vinyl and a static number or so of cd's.

The upstairs system is more casual - streaming from my phone; the occasional cd in the blue-ray player. I have about 200 tunes on my phone. I haven't bothered ripping any cd's onto my macbook pro yet. Now have I taken advantage of any download codes from the newer vinyl I've bought.

yes, the truck will have an aux jack as well as a USB.

I'll be looking for high quality files in my vehicle. I do serious listening when I drive, too. Not as serious or engaging as late-night sessions, but pretty intense.

So, my question to you is what is the car stereo you are considering?  Since you claim to want as high fidelity as possible in your truck, you really need to consider what DAC will be used.  That is a variable that you can control and need to consider.

Unless your truck is a 100k SUV, odds are the factory stereo with bluetooth has your typical crummy dac.  On the other hand, an aftermarket Alpine or Rockford has a much better DAC.  If you are going aftermarket, then bluetooth is better quality and easy.  If you are using a factory stereo with aux input, something in the lines of the Astell & Kern would be my first choice of quality in a car.

@elevick I would probably aftermarket both the car stereo and speakers. The company offers a $500 Bose 7-speaker upgrade package, but I doubt I would be happy with that And would be happy to spend more if it got me more.

And no $100K SUV; we're looking at a $32K pick-up at most. 

@simao

Start by ripping some CDs into an ALAC or AIFF format into iTunes on your Mac. Stay with AIFF or ALAC format because FLAC isnt compatible with iTunes. Pick your favorite CDs.

Sync them to your phone and play them via either bluetooth or with the audio/audio adapter on your iPhone depending on the iPhone model. Enjoy for awhile knowing you’ve spent zero $ to do this so far. Not counting the truck stereo. :)

Maybe get a Tidal HIfi subscription and use Tidal’s download feature to add music  to your phone via home wifi for playback later. This is a great way to listen to music not in your library. Heck, you could bag the CD rips and just do this but I’ll bet there’s an artist or two whose music you like who isn’t on Tidal. So there’s that.

Then, think about a player with lots of memory that’s compatible with Tidal and wifi and will hold a lot of your rips and Tidal tracks. An iPod Touch with, like, 128G of memory. Maybe something else but it has to have an operating system compatible with adding streaming apps like Tidal and plenty of memory.

But right now, you have everything you need to get started. Except, maybe, the connecting cable/adapter to the aux input.

Keep on trucking baby.

Some automobile manufacturers offer WiFi connectivity service - I think GM does, and that allows you to stream music for playback on your audio head unit. I don't have first hand experience but technically this functionality should allow you to listen to Tidal HiFi (via subscription) in your truck/car. Not sure how the data usage charges are calculated.