Aiwa CDC-MP32 Car CD Player

The CDC-MP32, Aiwa's second model of their car MP3 player is a great attempt at an emerging technology. Let's start at the beginning. Turning the car's key to the on position makes the little black faceplate automatically flip away in a process that never fails to impress. The unit comes on, playing whatever was playing last. For radio, it starts playing even before the buttons have fully emerged, sometimes irritating when you realize you left the volume up a little too high when you turned the car off. If you left off with a regular CD playing, it will start right where it left off, after a few-second pause. Although this pause is minor, it is longer than most other car CD players. Now, if you turned off the car in the middle of an MP3 song, the song will start over, after a considerable pause. And this is the main problem with this head unit. Reading MP3 CDs takes a while, and switching between tracks is equally slow, as it doesn't display the title of the track until it starts playing. If you could at least read the titles before it loaded the actual song, that would make it much faster. Also, the player has a tendency to reject CDs. Simply hitting eject, rubbing the CD on a seat or something soft will usually fix the problem. The player occasionally skips. Some mornings, simply changing lanes too violently will make it skip, other times, it runs fine ditches in the road. However, the skipping is never bad enough to be a problem. The final niggling problem is the 7 functions it has. FM1, FM2, FM3, AM1, AM2, DISC, AUX IN. FM1 and FM2 are fine, but three is a little excessive. In addition, 2 AMs are just plain useless, 1 is fine. The bright blue bar you may be reading about is really not that bright, and make the unit looks good. The visualization on the unit is nothing special, and doesn't impress anyone. But these are all mainly minor points. The H-Bass it offers is excellent, while the DSSA is useless. In everything that I haven't mentioned above, the CDC-MP32 excels.