Aiwa CDC-MP3 Car CD Player

I'd like to review this product in a thorough, covers-all-the-bases type of review. I'd like to tell you about all of its features and tell you whether or not I would recommend buying one. I'd like to tell you all this and more about the Aiwa CDC-MP3, but that's going to be difficult -- After all, my CDC-MP3 didn't work straight out of the box.

As soon as I found out that there were now car CD players that were able to play mp3 files, I was giddy. I immediately began to search Google for information about these elusive products. Basically, from the information I was able to dig up, there are exactly two car CD players which play mp3s and which are also available in the U.S. One is manufactured by Kenwood, a well-respected name in both home and car audio. Unfortunately, this unit retails for over $600, which made it an instant no-go for me.

The other mp3-playing car CD player I found was a cute, little unit called the Aiwa CDC-MP3. As is typical with most Aiwa products, the CDC-MP3 has lots of pretty (but pointless) colors and is, in general, aesthetically pleasing. According to the reviews I read, the CDC-MP3 was a fairly nice, first-generation unit which had a few kinks to be worked out. Unfortunately, I purposely ignored the fact that all of these reviews seemed to be based on information handed to the reviewers by Aiwa, as the authors hadn't actually used a CDC-MP3 unit. However, the main thing I saw was that the CDC-MP3 claimed to be able to play just about any type of mp3 file that exists. This proved to be too much of a temptation to pass up, and within a week I had bid on and won an Aiwa CDC-MP3 on eBay.

I quickly began to tell all my friends about it; after all, I was soon going to be able to listen to mp3s in my car! These days, with the immense popularity of and publicity surrounding Napster, I found that even my least computer-savvy friends knew what mp3s were and thought it would be really cool to be able to play them on a car CD player. Needless to say, I was pretty excited as I awaited receipt of my new unit. Everything went as planned until I went to have it installed: my brand-new, $300+ retail CDC-MP3 wouldn't even power up.

It was then that I started to come out of my mp3-anticipatory haze, and I started to recall the many negative things I'd heard about the CDC-MP3 since I had ordered mine just about a week ago. The resoundingly positive reviews here on Epinions (all five of them) notwithstanding, several different technicians and salespeople at three different electronics stores all told me they didn't care for this particular unit; in fact, they all told me that, in general, they wouldn't purchase any Aiwa car audio product. This made sense, once I thought about it, given the fact that Aiwa has traditionally made home audio products rather than car audio products, which they have only been making for a year or two now.

You can see all of the specifications for the Aiwa CDC-MP3 by looking at their homepage, so I see no point in including them here. The truth is that both the person from whom I purchased the CDC-MP3 as well as the technicians I talked to said that a large percentage of the units they've sold or come into contact with have been defective. As far as I'm concerned, this is whom I should have talked to in the first place, and I'm sorry that I didn't.

I elected to get a cash refund instead of exchanging my Aiwa CDC-MP3 for a new one, in light of all the information I've come across in the last week or so. While I wouldn't recommend that everyone stay away from the CDC-MP3 just based on my experience, I would certainly recommend that you do the research yourself and be sure that you purchase your unit from a reputable seller who will refund your money or give you an exchange if your unit is defective.