Great MP-3 Auto Deck
Written: Dec 20 '00
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Price, MP3, Power
Cons: Skipped once
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| jjgeek's Full Review: Aiwa CDC-MP3 Car CD Player |
This is a really innovative product. It is one of only two car deck MP-3 players on the market that I know of (20DEC00), the other being a Kenwood deck at about $750USD retail. At $300USD retail for the Aiwa it is a good deal in my opinion. I found mine and Best Buy at $285USD.
The deck has good power and good sound. MP3s cut at 128K sound as good as CDs on this deck. If you arrange your music in folders/directories you can hop from one directory to the next, which makes the deck operate as if each directory were a virtual CD in a changer. It seems to read the 700MB CDRs just fine. So with 128K at about 1 minute of music per MB you can expect to be able to put about 700 minutes of music on one CD. I find that this is usually about 15 virtual CDs in my one disc "changer". If you get the right music on your disc, you won't be changing the CD too often.
The ID information about artist, song, album, track etc. is all displayable on the scrolling text front panel. This of course requires you to have this information encoded with your .MP3 file. Most of the good MP3 rippers will load this data for you automatically by accessing the CDDB information on the web. This is are very nice feature to see the song name scrolling across the front panel while the song is playing. It would be nice if it could handle longer file names, it seems to truncate at 20 or 25 characters which is plenty, but it would be nice to have more characters on the display and more scrolling. This is a very minor issue and for generation 1 of these decks it is not a stopper in any way. The majority of the face real estate is used by the VU meter, which is nice to have but doesn't warrant this much space.
The front panel flips down to load/unload the cd which is motorized and works really slick. The front panel is removable and the unit comes with a carrying case for the front panel.
I've been driving around with it this week only playing MP3s. I had only one skip in the play when I hit a big pothole. I'm in a rather stiff Porsche, so if you have a stiff car and lots of pot holes, you might get some skip.
A remote is included and configured to attach to the steering wheel. I don't need or want it but it is interesting and seems to work fine. In the right vehicle with a more difficult reach to the deck this might be a nice feature.
The FM section sounds great and has auto preset to load the stronger stations into memory. I'm not getting any AM and will need to figure out if I hooked up something wrong or if there is a problem.
I have about 5 CDs in my car now and this gives me about 55 hours of music to choose from. If you are into MP3 you must have this in your car.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
jjgeek
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Reviews written: 2
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