What should you look for when choosing a car stereo?

Upgrading your car stereo's receiver is the one of the easiest ways to boost your dashboard tech. Here are the seven features we look for when making recommendations.

The Pioneer AppRadio series are among of the most fully-featured app mirroring receivers on the market.

When most people think about a "car stereo," they're actually thinking about the receiver. Also known as the head unit or deck, the receiver is both the brain and heart of your car audio system and the bit that you'll directly interact with from behind the wheel. When you choose a receiver, you're also locking in your available audio sources, features, and the expandability of the rest of your car audio system.

So what should you look for when choosing for a new receiver? Here are the 7 attributes that we consider when recommending a car stereo, along with a few of our top picks to get you started on your search.

The most important bits that you should look for are the audio sources that you most often use.

Do you need a CD player? Will you be using your receiver for DVD playback when parked? Have you ditched discs in favor of digital media? Depending on your answer, you'll have to decide whether to go with a traditional CD-receiver with a slot for your discs, a larger A/V receiver with a color screen, or a mechless receiver that ditches the drive and all of the moving parts that come with it.

Even if you still keep a book of CDs in your car's glove box, odds are good that you or a passenger will want to plug a phone or media player up to your car at some point, so make sure that your new receiver at the very least includes a USB port for MP3, AAC, or WMA playback from flash storage devices and a 3.5mm analog auxiliary input for universal connectivity.

The early adopters' choice: Parrot Asteroid Completely ditching its optical drive in favor of non-physical, the Parrot Asteroid is one of the most forward looking receivers that we've tested. Though its sometimes-buggy reliance on USB-stored, Bluetooth-streamed, and Web-connected media will appeal mainly to early adopters and tinkerers, this diminutive deck shows much promise thanks to its large (for a single-DIN) color display and Asteroid Market of Android-based applications for navigation and audio streaming.

You're a CNET reader, which means the odds are good there's smartphone in your pocket that you'll want your new car stereo to play nice with. Be sure to check out CNET's guides to using your Android phone or connecting your iOS device to the car for details. The broad advice is to look for the "Made with iPhone" badge to ensure that the USB port on your new stereo supports full speed access to your iDevice's media. Users of the iPhone 5S, 5C, or any of the iPads that use the new Lightning connector will also want to make sure the receiver uses a plain-vanilla USB port and not an older 30-pin connector.

Android, Windows Phone, and Blackberry users have no badges to look for. Either pick a receiver that uses A2DP stereo Bluetooth audio streaming for wireless media playback or make use of the aforementioned auxiliary input for the simplest connection.

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What should you look for when choosing a car stereo?