I’m looking at this as the market ruling supreme.
Just over two years ago I posted this about how I so very badly wanted the car audio market to produce a quality head unit that prominently featured a USB connection. It’s taken a while, but they’ve come around to finally listening to me and all the other shoppers.
Since Buddy the Jeep came with an AM/FM cassette deck with poor radio reception and 4 speakers, three of which were blown out and one of which was completely non-functional, last week was when I went a-shopping and this was the week I went a-buying.
After a few days of narrowing down my choices to “must have’s”, I ended up looking at these two head units:
Everything else was just too expensive or too poorly thought out, and once I was able to deal with them both first hand, one of them also fell to the bad practical use demons.
I ended up deciding on the Kenwood.
I currently run a full Clarion set-up (except for one very nice Kenwood amp) in my F150 and that head unit has controls which are exactly the same as this KDC deck, down to the number, size and placement of the mini-buttons. This is kind of creepy, because that Clarion deck was state of the art when it hit the market and the only one on the market at the time with the “single knob” style control, which is why I bought it. Everyone else was putting out decks that had multiple knobs and/or just a bunch of teeter-totter type push-button controls, which I had had enough of at that time.
Apparently, I’m a trend-setter.
Kenwood has simplified everything with this unit and made it so simple that someone who couldn’t spell USB could use it. The wise guys at Kenwood even figured out a little plastic door that rolls over the USB connection to keep dust and other debris out of it.
The knob teeters up/down to select folders and left/right to select tracks. The SRC button lets you “source” your music (tuner, USB, CD). Also, if you’ve labeled the folders and tracks, it’ll tell you what you’re listening to.
There are so many EQ settings that I haven’t even tested them all out yet, having gotten stuck on the “User” setting that I customized for myself.
The Clarion was also quite nice, and my only problem with it was, well, the multitude of teeter-totter switches set me off, and the USB port cover was of the type that would be rather annoying to have to deal with if you’re switching out thumbs while not parked.
Btw, I filled in the speaker ports with four Infinity Reference 5022i speakers and an Infinity Reference 475a amp. I have also come to the conclusion that I’m going deaf and will be needing to fill out the sound with a sub. I didn’t do it the first time around because of how much space it would have taken up, but after I tire of the dead pan, I’ll prolly whip out the card for it (and I never thought I’d say this, but for space reasons, I may just go with a tube).
So now that you know what The Wife and I will be listening through while we go snow hunting today, you should prolly know what we’ll be listening to.
Unfortunately, I can’t tell you that because she hasn’t made her musical selections just yet. But I know the Afghan Whigs will be on at least one of the thumb drives I’ll have with me.
From their last and final album, 1965
Enjoy.
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