My GMX322 has worked without a hiccup since day 1. From everything I have read though, product quality went down the drain with the GMX550. It sucks too because seeing the settings in the cluster display is a great feature.Thanks of your post Roger. I'm glad you posted this. It shows that their service and their product sucks... I've yet to hear one good thing about them. If you want your iPod/iDevice to sound good, you basically have to run 300+ kbps bitrate audio which is pretty much unheard of unless you are directly ripping a CD into iTunes and leave it as un-compressed as possible.
As far as iPod sound goes though, connected using the dock connector, I have never experienced any degraded sound quality either with an aftermarket headunit (my experience is with an old Pioneer Avic-D3) or with a factory implementation. I would figure that using all the factory harnesses and the dock connector plugged into it would produce sound that is just as good. From other posts though it seems like I am definitely not alone with this issue. Being that this is one of the two reasons I upgraded, this is definitely a dealbreaker for me.
Also, I am still waiting for that e-mail from Coastal with the technicians name and direct line. He never mentioned his name during the call and the number came up as blocked in my caller ID so I am just waiting at the moment.