Gaari Means Car. Car Reviews & Car News

This is my 2nd MP3 player by kenwood. My first one was a much older model and after what seems like easily 6 or 7 years of faithful service I decided to upgrade.

The usb port on the front is what makes it worth the upgrade. I can put thousands of songs onto a dirt cheap thumbdrive and not have to worry about MP3 cd’s all over my car.

The headunit also breathed new life into my 11 year old factory volvo speakers. I had no idea they could sound as good as they do. I’ve still got plans to put a recently acquired set of boston acoustic 6.5″ speakers in the front doors but I’m re-thinking my decision to also upgrade the rear door and rear deck speakers.

As far as the things about the unit that I don’t like, they’re very minor. For one, the 1~6 buttons control playback options and what not. The numbers of the buttons are very easy to read as they’re lit up but the functions is in a gray colored text that makes it hard to read. Before actually reading it in the manual, I didn’t know how to pause playback. The number 6 button does that but you wouldn’t know by looking at the unit because the little play/pause label is nearly impossible to read.

also, when adjusting the bass, mids and treble, like my older unit, these only go to 8. Why 8??? Why not 10? Kenwood, this makes no sense. Stop it. Also, I’m a little disappointed to see the attenuation button absent from the unit. I used that pretty frequently on my older one but I guess they have to save something for the units that cost more than $110.

Anyways, minor complaints and that’s about it. The unit sounds great, and aside from initially figuring out what the small buttons do, I really like it. The music is easier to hear on the interstate as well. That was an unexpected surprise.
Rating: 5 / 5

We purchased this in July for a road trip. We didn’t want to spend a fortune and we wanted it to be user friendly to use. We went to Best Buy to actually try them out after reading reviews from other folks. We are older so we wanted something that we could see well in the dark but wasn’t distracting. We wanted it to be easy to use when we are driving too. We also wanted to plug our mp3 players into it if we drove into areas that didn’t have much to offer on the radio. After looking at several it was a no brainer it was this one hands down. We liked the blue colored display and the easy presets and volume control. It also has a usb connection so we can charge our mp3 players when we aren’t playing them. There is a cd player but we don’t use it that much if at all since it is easier to hook up the mp3 player then sifting through the cds one at a time. We were in a hurry so we bought it at Best Buy for 139.00 which included tax of 11.48. If we had time I would have shopped for a better price. Without tax here on Amazon with s&h it is I think $113.00 which is a much better deal. Also one note about installation. We had all the harnesses from previous older radio ready to go. But this unit requires that it be hooked to the battery because it has this internal clock. Ours already had the wiring right but at some point we had removed a fuse or maybe never had a fuse in this slot in the truck before. That fuse was important for this new radio to work. I posted to a truck forum and learned where I needed to add a fuse to get the clock and the radio working. I had never installed one before, just took the old one out so it took me some time to figure it out but really if I as a housewife can figure it out then anyone can do it. It sounds great and we didn’t spend a fortune. We had a Kenwood before that we liked and had died after several years but we were open to any brand but we ended up with this particular Kenwood.
Rating: 5 / 5

One thing keeps me from rating this 5 stars, and that is it’s inability to randomly play an entire USB flash drive if the music is organized by artist/folders. The only way to search gigabytes of music is to organize either by style, decade, artist, etc. To do this one must create folders on the drive, but once multiple folders are created, this receiver can not play all of your music randomly. It can only play what is in the selected folder randomly.

Beyond this this is a significant upgrade to my 1998 4runners factory stereo. My previously installed after-market speakers sound much better with this new receiver, telling me the factory unit was severely under-powered!

The aux input, which should have been included on every car stereo made since 1980, is a nice touch.

You can randomly play all your ipod music.

Decent looks, CD capability and satellite readiness make this a good buy.

I should note that the maximum number of songs in a folder is 255 so you cannot randomly play more than 255 of your songs. This is the biggest limitation of the unit. The maximum number of folders is 255.

Edit: I found an inexpensive fix for the random play issue. I purchased an external 60G USB harddrive from Xigmatek. Once formatted to FAT32, it works like a champ, and I now have a random folder with all my favorites, and all my other folders by artist/genre. Now I like my Kenwood even more.

Rating: 4 / 5