Blaupunkt Laguna CD35 Car CD Player

I purchased this unit from Crutchfield to replace the dying factory radio in my 94 Ford Explorer. I planned to hook it up to my existing factory amp (which is buried in the back of the truck behind interior body panels), so I wanted a head unit with four channel line-level outputs (most cheaper units only have two channel outputs). I also wanted a rear auxiliary input, because I wanted to hard-wire my XM satellite radio into it, without having wires hanging out of the front of the radio in an "AUX IN" jack.

Because the radio was so inexpensive, I had to pay for the Crutchfield wiring harnesses. This got me a speaker output, power hookup, and a factory amp bypass harness, which I didn't use. Crutchfield also insisted that I needed a rear radio bracket support, a minor $5 item, but I was slightly angered while installing the unit to find that this item was not only not required, but was too large to even fit onto the support track in my Explorer.

Crutchfield sells a $40 "adapter" that converts speaker level outputs to line level inputs for the factory amp. Instead of buying this I soldered some RCA audio cables onto Crutchfield's audio (speaker) harness, and plugged them into the line level outputs on the head unit.

There is an "AUX IN" harness available for this head unit, but Crutchfield is sold out of them, and doesn't know when they will be getting any more. I found lots of people selling them on eBay for $5 and bought one there.

Removal of the factory head unit from the dash took about 45 minutes, very frustrating until I discovered that even though the Crutchfield instructions say to push the DIN removal tools towards the center of the radio to unlock and remove it, you actually have to do the opposite - push them away from the center of the radio. It probably would have taken more like 5 minutes if those instructions had been correct.

Crutchfield's power hookup harness had the "remote antenna" output from the radio hooked up to nothing, and had no connection at all for the "remote factory amp turn on" pin on the factory harness. I disassembled their harness and moved the "remote antenna" pin one place to the right, so that I could use it to turn on the factory amp.

The harness hookups were fine except for Crutchfield's audio harness. The pins were out of alignment in the connector, and it took probably another 45 minutes of trial-and-error fiddling with it, bending pins ever so slightly with a small screwdriver in order to get it to seat properly into the factory connector.

Now that it's installed and working, I'm fairly pleased with the unit. It has very good sound, good tone control, a simple user interface, and clear display. I was able to set the color of the display to match my dashboard exactly. The bass and treble settings are remembered for each source, and each can be adjusted in level and in center frequency (almost a parametric equalizer, missing only frequency width). I particularly like the feature where the radio can be turned on even if the car is turned off. The UI is simple enough that I was able to set it up and do almost all the configurations without even reading the manual. So many radios these days have arcane user interfaces created by blind chimpanzees. Kudos to Blaupunkt for this one.

My dislikes about the radio:

- Only the text display dims with the dash lighting. The blue volume knob and red buttons stay at the same intensity.

- The volume knob is small, and cannot be adjusted with gloves on.

- The radio reception is not quite as good (sensitive on distant signals) as my factory receiver.

- The audio levels vary greatly between sources. The radio is quite loud, the CD is quieter, and the AUX IN is virtually inaudible until you turn the volume WAY up (which means you get lots of hiss and noise along with it). I assume a hotter source than my XM radio would solve this problem, but the XM radio *is* putting out line level audio at its highest level. Because of this, you have to adjust the volume control every time you change sources.

- The simulated "VU" peak level meter is just that - simulated. It jumps around and shows signal even when the radio is playing dead silence. I found it annoying, fortunately the radio allows you to turn it off.

- The locking sleeve does not "lock" the radio in place very well. A fair bit of bending locking tabs with a screwdriver through trial and error was required in order to get it to finally lock.

- The Blaupunkt manual devotes many pages to describing every minute feature of the radio in great detail, in about 10 different languages no less. However, installation instructions consist of two or three pages of diagrams with no descriptions or instructions of any kind. It uses labels and callouts (A, B, C etc) to identify the wires and parts etc. but doesn't actually tell you anywhere what the labels mean, or what the callouts are identifying. When it came to figuring out how to get the sleeve to lock the radio in place, I was on my own. I understand Blaupunkt sells this radio internationally and is trying to give language-neutral installation details, but a bit more detail would be appreciated.

Overall, I'm pleased with my purchase, while it was a bit of a hassle getting it installed, and took some advance planning, it's now operating fine, and I expect it to remain that way.