Showing posts with label car stereos. Show all posts
Showing posts with label car stereos. Show all posts

Saturday, January 21, 2012

Kenwood KDC-MP638U USB/AAC/WMA/MP3 CD Receiver with External Media Control Review

Kenwood KDC-MP638U USB/AAC/WMA/MP3 CD Receiver with External Media Control
Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)
Very stylish with silver knobs and glossy black finish. Around the knobs glow blue, not overly bright either, doesnt bother me at night. The knobs have rubber around the edge for grip to easily turn them which is actually a nice feature because the knobs are sturdy and dont feel cheap.
The function of the screen is hit and miss. I would like to have a graphic image but if you have an image then you only get 1-line of text on the screen like artist/song title. If you want more lines of text like I do then you cant have the graphic image in the background. I want artist/song title and I like seeing the clock as well, so no background image for me. However, the text is very easy to read and you get choices of what text you want like if you want to see playtime instead of the clock, or artist album and song title.
USB works great. It comes with a decent length USB cable that I routed to a cubby hole underneath my receiver out of sight and reachable. I hooked up an 8gb flash card with only about 3gb of music so far. It recognizes it right away and begins playing your first folder. This is how the USB works. It reads FOLDERS, not playlists (or I havent figured it out yet). Right now I have 3 folders ROCK, HIPHOP, OTHER. Downside of this if you have a ROCK folder with a mix of rock music which includes Nirvana and say you have a Nirvana folder with only Nirvana music, then those Nirvana songs take up twice the space on your USB device because you cannot use playlists so the actually file needs to be on your USB device twice (one in each folder). Also, you cannot sort music, so if you only want to listen to Nirvana then you are going to have to make a NIRVANA folder and throw the music in there or just skip songs in a mixed folder until you get to Nirvana songs. You can random play songs in folders but you cannot random play ALL FOLDERS. So it wont play songs from my ROCK folder then play a song from my HIPHOP folder. This would have been a nice feature. Every now and then the USB device will just say "Reading" trying to read the next song. Doesnt happen to often and all you have to do is turn the receiver off then on and its good to go. Turning it on picks up right where you turned it off.
The Zone2 capability only works with the Auxillary input. So you cannot play your CDs in the rear speakers, and USB up front. Only the Auxillary input will play in the back speakers. Havent had to use this feature yet, but thats how it works.
Music quality inproved from my stock receiver slightly. Not a drastic improvement, but it does sound a bit more clean in the highs.
Havent tried bluetooth or sirius. Dont use the radio much but picks up my stations no problem and you can even name them on the receiver.
Overall this is a great receiver for the price.

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USB/AAC/WMA/MP3 CD Receiver with External Media Control

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Wednesday, June 1, 2011

Jensen VM9212N 7-Inch Touch Screen Navigation Ready Multimedia Receiver Review

Jensen VM9212N 7-Inch Touch Screen Navigation Ready Multimedia Receiver
Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)
I bought this because I work in security and use my own vehichle on the job. It can get pretty boring most nights and dragging my laptop around to play videos gets to be a bit much sometimes.
The video quality is excellent on the 7 inch widescreen display. Not to mention that it plays a wide variety of formats (which is what grabbed me) that more expensive players don't touch: DVD, DVD±R/RW, VCD, SVCD, AVI (DivX/XviD), MPEG1, MPEG2, JPEG, CD, CD-R, CD-RW, MP3, and WMA. I download everything so that is very important to me so's that I don't have to spend time re-encoding videos. The only time it didn't play a video for me was because it was an HD Xvid (unbeknownst to me).
The audio sounds awesome on my stock speakers (Pontiac Aztek) with surround sound on video playback.
I also listen to audiobooks 90% of the time at work and being able to burn them onto a CD-R/DVD-R as MP3's is a wonderful thing without having to use multiple discs to burn out an 8 hour book. I can easily fit 8 books onto a DVD-R. The only glitch I've found is when an audio segment is over 1 hour in length. The player begins to replay the track from the beginning of the track at about 1 hour 15 minutes into the track and is really annoying to get it back into place. So I suggest you break up the long segments (ie. Audible downloads) into smaller (20-50 minute) tracks with Audiobook Cutter or Audacity (or any other audio editing software).
For the $230 I paid for it elsewhere, it is well worth the money and my only regret is that a couple of months after I bought it, Jensen came out with the same unit with an SD card reader.


Click Here to see more reviews about: Jensen VM9212N 7-Inch Touch Screen Navigation Ready Multimedia Receiver

7 inch touch screen navigation-ready receiver.

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