Aiwa CDC-MP3 Car CD Player
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- MP3 / WMA Playback: MP3 Playback
- Player Type: CD
- Controlled Devices: CD Changer DVD Changer Mini Disk Player
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Dual XDMA6370 MP3 Player
$79.99
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I pay the price of being an early adopter...again
Pros
Plays MP3 CDs in your car. My daughter thinks it looks cool
Cons
Rotten "random" feature. Display is too short. Owner's manual is awful.
Recommended it?
No
The Bottom Line:
Three hundred clams is a bit much to pay for something that plays CDs well and MP3s kind of okay. Wait for the next generation.
I bought a portable MP3 cd player last summer. In spite of its foibles (no ID3 Tag support, can't fast forward or rewind in an MP3) I liked it a lot. It came with a car kit, but to be honest, between the cables all over the place and the squeaking cassette player interface, I wanted something else. (See my separate review on that player, the Phillips Expanium.)
When I saw that Best Buy was carrying an MP3 in-dash player, I really, really wanted it, particularly since it did have at least filename support, and could FF and rewind within MP3s. I spent about 30 seconds looking at it in the store before plunking down the $300 for it. They took about an hour to install it, and off I went...
Into frustration land...
Because my mom always taught me "if you can't say something nice about something," I like to start out with what I like, to wit:
MP3 Support
Yep, true to the box's label, it can indeed play MP3s. I've got about a dozen burned and I haven't had a problem with any of the files I've heard so far. I've only run CD-Rs, so can't speak to whether CD-RW works well. You can fast forward and rewind within an MP3, unlike my Expanium.
CD Player
It can also play regular old cds. Unlike MP3 cds, if you turn off the player (or the car) in the middle of the song, it will resume where it left off.
Display
I think it's a bit overdone, not unlike a bad Science Fiction movie. But my nine year old daughter and her friends think it looks really cool. So if you're looking to make your marks with the 4th Grade crowd, here's your chance.
Controls
They're reasonable. Volume is set with a knob, not up and down buttons, which I don't care for, although changing the volume sets the "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" lights on the display flashing. You can switch to a different album on the MP3 cd with buttons along the bottom, which also serve as presets for the radio. There are three FM and 2 AM "modes," which means you can preprogram 30 different stations.
Preprogramming
I'm not sure what it would be useful for, but you can set the unit to tune into a station at a set time (like setting it for the news on your morning commute.) You can do this for two times a day. I have no use for it, but thought it was a kind of cool feature.
Sound
I have kind of dyslexic hearing...I won't try to explain that, but suffice to say that I'm not one of those people who can tell good sound from bad, and makes an issue out of it. The stereo sounds fine to me. No better or worse than the factory unit that was in there before. For me, the sound is acceptable, but you'd better have a listen in the store before buying.
Okay, time to start dissing them...
MP3 CD structure (and "Random" feature)
You can set up your MP3 cd with one level of folders. In other words, you can't put a folder within a folder and have the unit find it.
Putting things in folders is nice, because that's how you organize "albums" -- put all of the tracks from one album in a folder by themselves, and you can use the "album" buttons to jump around.
However, and this is a big negative, the "Random" (or shuffle) feature of the player only works within the current album. Ergo, it's pretty useless unless you put all of the songs on the cd within one folder, which defeats the whole purpose of the album organization.
Song name display
The biggest shortcoming of the player display is that the engineers must have been burning sample cds on a Mac -- file names are limited to 32 characters. Anything longer is truncated. If your ripping software embeds the ID3 Tag correctly (mine apparently doesn't) both the artist name and title of the song are also displayable (also limited to 32 characters,) although you must rotate through the different display options to view them -- I couldn't find a way to show both the artist and song title without pressing buttons.
Skipping
Other reviewers here have complained about skipping. I can attest to that -- when I had them install it, I told them explicitly to bunker it in as best they could. Even so, there's a pothole I hit on the way to work that makes it skip every time, and it's happened a couple of other times besides that location, on both normal and MP3 cds. Why they didn't spend a couple of bucks for a ten second buffer, I'll never know.
MP3 resume
Like my Expanium, when you turn off the player and turn it back on, it goes back to the beginning of the song that you were playing. Very annoying for people like me who listen to long songs.
Pauses and delays
There is a mandatory two second delay between MP3s, which I suppose is expected, but which make live or concept albums sound disjointed. There is also a significant delay after putting the cd in, while it sorts everything out. This varies depending on how much you've stuffed on there, but averages about a minute for me.
Owner's manual omissions
When I first got this thing in, it had this annoying "Welcome to Aiwa Car Audio" message that kept scrolling across the display. I would click the Display button to change it to something else (like the clock or the song title) and after about five seconds it would go back to the ad.
I don't know about you, but I found that really annoying. So, I broke out the owner's manual to see what I could do about it. Nowhere in there does it say anything about the display. How to set the clock? Yes. How to use the useful "programmable station" thingy? Multiple pages. How to make the display work like every other one on earth? Nada.
Finally, in exasperation, I started punching buttons like a wild man. Something did it (I think I held down "Display" for a long time) and now it works like a normal display. If you have the same problem, I wish I could help, but more than that, I wish someone at Aiwa had bothered putting in two sentences about it in the manual.
Conclusion
Do I regret this purchase? Mildly. It would be a much better player if they had:
a) A buffer, of some sort, to avoid skips
b) A "random" feature that didn't care what folders things were in
c) Someone who could write a good manual
If you're totally nuts about MP3s and really want them in your car, it's worth taking a look at, taking into account the shortcomings as I see them. If you can overlook these things to be the first one on your block to have an MP3 player in your car, this may be the player for you. Everyone else can probably wait until they shake the bugs out.
(Because I got a question on this with my Expanium, I'll address it here -- to use this player you must have a CD burner (or access to one) to make the cds. Burning cds with MP3s on them is simplicity itself, but you do have to have the hardware to do it.)
When I saw that Best Buy was carrying an MP3 in-dash player, I really, really wanted it, particularly since it did have at least filename support, and could FF and rewind within MP3s. I spent about 30 seconds looking at it in the store before plunking down the $300 for it. They took about an hour to install it, and off I went...
Into frustration land...
Because my mom always taught me "if you can't say something nice about something," I like to start out with what I like, to wit:
MP3 Support
Yep, true to the box's label, it can indeed play MP3s. I've got about a dozen burned and I haven't had a problem with any of the files I've heard so far. I've only run CD-Rs, so can't speak to whether CD-RW works well. You can fast forward and rewind within an MP3, unlike my Expanium.
CD Player
It can also play regular old cds. Unlike MP3 cds, if you turn off the player (or the car) in the middle of the song, it will resume where it left off.
Display
I think it's a bit overdone, not unlike a bad Science Fiction movie. But my nine year old daughter and her friends think it looks really cool. So if you're looking to make your marks with the 4th Grade crowd, here's your chance.
Controls
They're reasonable. Volume is set with a knob, not up and down buttons, which I don't care for, although changing the volume sets the "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" lights on the display flashing. You can switch to a different album on the MP3 cd with buttons along the bottom, which also serve as presets for the radio. There are three FM and 2 AM "modes," which means you can preprogram 30 different stations.
Preprogramming
I'm not sure what it would be useful for, but you can set the unit to tune into a station at a set time (like setting it for the news on your morning commute.) You can do this for two times a day. I have no use for it, but thought it was a kind of cool feature.
Sound
I have kind of dyslexic hearing...I won't try to explain that, but suffice to say that I'm not one of those people who can tell good sound from bad, and makes an issue out of it. The stereo sounds fine to me. No better or worse than the factory unit that was in there before. For me, the sound is acceptable, but you'd better have a listen in the store before buying.
Okay, time to start dissing them...
MP3 CD structure (and "Random" feature)
You can set up your MP3 cd with one level of folders. In other words, you can't put a folder within a folder and have the unit find it.
Putting things in folders is nice, because that's how you organize "albums" -- put all of the tracks from one album in a folder by themselves, and you can use the "album" buttons to jump around.
However, and this is a big negative, the "Random" (or shuffle) feature of the player only works within the current album. Ergo, it's pretty useless unless you put all of the songs on the cd within one folder, which defeats the whole purpose of the album organization.
Song name display
The biggest shortcoming of the player display is that the engineers must have been burning sample cds on a Mac -- file names are limited to 32 characters. Anything longer is truncated. If your ripping software embeds the ID3 Tag correctly (mine apparently doesn't) both the artist name and title of the song are also displayable (also limited to 32 characters,) although you must rotate through the different display options to view them -- I couldn't find a way to show both the artist and song title without pressing buttons.
Skipping
Other reviewers here have complained about skipping. I can attest to that -- when I had them install it, I told them explicitly to bunker it in as best they could. Even so, there's a pothole I hit on the way to work that makes it skip every time, and it's happened a couple of other times besides that location, on both normal and MP3 cds. Why they didn't spend a couple of bucks for a ten second buffer, I'll never know.
MP3 resume
Like my Expanium, when you turn off the player and turn it back on, it goes back to the beginning of the song that you were playing. Very annoying for people like me who listen to long songs.
Pauses and delays
There is a mandatory two second delay between MP3s, which I suppose is expected, but which make live or concept albums sound disjointed. There is also a significant delay after putting the cd in, while it sorts everything out. This varies depending on how much you've stuffed on there, but averages about a minute for me.
Owner's manual omissions
When I first got this thing in, it had this annoying "Welcome to Aiwa Car Audio" message that kept scrolling across the display. I would click the Display button to change it to something else (like the clock or the song title) and after about five seconds it would go back to the ad.
I don't know about you, but I found that really annoying. So, I broke out the owner's manual to see what I could do about it. Nowhere in there does it say anything about the display. How to set the clock? Yes. How to use the useful "programmable station" thingy? Multiple pages. How to make the display work like every other one on earth? Nada.
Finally, in exasperation, I started punching buttons like a wild man. Something did it (I think I held down "Display" for a long time) and now it works like a normal display. If you have the same problem, I wish I could help, but more than that, I wish someone at Aiwa had bothered putting in two sentences about it in the manual.
Conclusion
Do I regret this purchase? Mildly. It would be a much better player if they had:
a) A buffer, of some sort, to avoid skips
b) A "random" feature that didn't care what folders things were in
c) Someone who could write a good manual
If you're totally nuts about MP3s and really want them in your car, it's worth taking a look at, taking into account the shortcomings as I see them. If you can overlook these things to be the first one on your block to have an MP3 player in your car, this may be the player for you. Everyone else can probably wait until they shake the bugs out.
(Because I got a question on this with my Expanium, I'll address it here -- to use this player you must have a CD burner (or access to one) to make the cds. Burning cds with MP3s on them is simplicity itself, but you do have to have the hardware to do it.)
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