Kenwood XD-A53 Audio Shelf System

I bought an identical model that looks exactly like the one in this review. It was sold as model XD-V333 in other countries when I was touring. It was very light and easy to carry, and the pricing is attractive.

The construction is very lightweight due to many plastic parts - I don't know what will happen if you dropped it by mistake when moving around - I bet you have to get a new one soon! There is very little metal except the top and rear enclosures.

It comes with a 3-disc changer, plays regular audio CD and video CD (VCD) as well. The North American model may not play video CD. Comes complete with AM/FM, Auxiliary channel, two audio tape player, two 75 Ohms speakers, remote control and antenna. It is still so light that I could lift with one hand. Amazing!

The audio player consist of deck A and deck B. Deck A is for playing only while deck B is for playing and recording. Here comes my complaint: It does not come with high speed dubbing. Normal dubbing is slow and boring, any other normal and boring audio system could do that. Plus, there is not enough control buttons to select many of the important functions. Instead, Kenwood engineers think it is better for you to use the complicated menu system to select the stuff you want - even for normal speed dubbing. This is NOT a user-friendly system, even my wife hates going throught the menus and have several different buttons to press for menu options and selection. Even for mundane tasks like fast forward or rewind, you will have to turn the round knob in the desired direction to get it going. What ever happened to the simple push buttons?

The AM/FM is another boring stuff. It comes with automatic channel scanning and selection. So why then it does not manage to register and select my favourite channels that are on? Even I could do better with manual selection, just turn the knob until the desired station number appears and its there! So why doesn't automatic selection work every time? And every beat of the music is registered as a series of colorful lights which looked incredibly silly to me.

The 3-disc changer is slow and mediocre. Press the eject button and it seems to take forever to eject the disc tray - it insists to make increadibly lengthy and annoying sounds before ejecting at slower than a snail's pace. The one thing that I like is the VCD playback capability which I don't think North American models have. VCDs have optically inferior performance to DVDs but I guess they are good enough for the TV screen. But you don't have to worry about that as VCD format is not common in this part of the world.

The audio power looks impressive at 1600W PMPO. That is not actually the real power output as I understand now. The manufacturer always quote the "peak power" to make their system look better than it really is. What we are interested in is the real power or "rms" as I understand. The real power is actually smaller than whatever they told you on. It is also very easy to discern - just play your music on it, and it gives incredibly crappy performance even in a very small space or room. I actually had to buy separately, 2 more powerful speakers and hook them up as the main speakers, and the original speakers were given the tasks of surround sound speakers. Now it sounds better, but still way short of better performance I am accustomed to.

And since it was bought on tour, there is no way I could return the system for a refund...could you imaging how dificult that would be? Even at the low price that I forked out for it, is it worth it? I would probably leave it to my child, who wouldn't know the difference at this age, while I get myself something better!