I removed the front of the factory radio and reinstalled it in the dash. My go-to is a 2-piece marine radio. I mount the amp/tuner under the passenger seat and mount the control head in the console. The marine radios usually have AM, FM stereo, Bluetooth, USB, weather channel, and are XM ready, so there are many choices and they are easy to use. I put over 3500 songs on a USB stick and it just plays all the time. Or I can use my cellphone as a tuner for streaming.
I've built a lot of cars over the years, and the aftermarket factory look-a-like radios can be finicky to use when they try to make a dozen functions work from 4 knobs or they put a digital readout behind the manual dial decal. I installed one of the $600 radios a couple years ago and although it looked fantastic, the functionality was not user friendly IMO and the radio lost it's memory everytime the battery was disconnected.
This is our '69 that I did.
