Pioneer DEH-P4600 Car CD / MP3 Player
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Similar in In Dash Receivers
- MP3 / WMA Playback: MP3 Playback
- Anti-Theft Protection: Detachable Face Panel
- Player Type: CD
- Controlled Devices: CD Changer TV Tuner XM Ready iPod / iPhone
- iPod/iPhone Compatible: Yes
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4600MP Competitive deck for the price with excellent equalizer control
Pros
Competitive within its price category, great equalizer control
Cons
Subpar radio receptioin, some too small buttons, not enough display information
Recommended it?
Yes
The Bottom Line:
Good deck for the category with equalizer control ahead of the pack. Slightly lacking in radio reception with buttons that are too small.
I wanted a new car deck that would allow me to play CDs, and more importantly CD-R's that have my mp3 and wma's on them. After testing them out at the store and going through Crutchfield, I eventually settled on a deck in my price budget (~$170): the Pioneer DEH-P4600MP. I'm generally satisfied with the deck, particularly with the deck's equalizer controls which balanced my less than audiophile car speakers.
Originally, I wanted the Alpine CDA-9827, due to Alpine's excellent reputation for quality sound. I was really budgeting for a $150-200 range deck, and within that range, it's really hard to distinguish audio differences between the decks. I believe that car audio, just like the more precise home audio, is largely dependent upon the quality of the SPEAKERS, as they are weakest link. My budget only afforded me some Kenwood 6.5 ($80) front speakers and JBL GTO926 6x9's ($140) for the rear as factory replacements. To balance this set, the $150-200 deck price range seemed about right.
Besides the Alpine, I also liked this Pioneer deck for the bang for buck. Besides good sound quality, the sound control functions set this deck apart.
FEATURES
This deck features four 22W RMS per channel and can play regular audio CDs and CD-R's with mp3's and wma's on it. It's able to display the titles and has a 3 adjustable band (+6/-6) equalizer and 4 preset EQ settings. A tri level loudness control allows you to smudge out the bass for a simulated bigger bass sound. There are 6 preset buttons and four groups (FM1, FM2, FM3, and AM). The deck also has four line level RCA outputs for hooking up an external power amp if desired.
RADIO
I'm still using my stock antenna and radio reception is disappointingly slightly worse than the stock Honda deck in my 97 Civic. I can clearly hear the static in the channels, and weaker stations seem to have a harder time being picked up. Even so, reception is good enough that I don't feel that the deck fails in this category.
Tuning is done digitally in 0.1 FM increments and search annoyingly requires that you hold down the tune up/down buttons for a couple seconds for each seek. There is a scan mode which automatically programs one group of presets (ie. FM3) but since most metropolitan areas have significantly more than just 6 strong stations this feature is largely useless unless you're in rural areas. The radio does have station identifier information which is nice if the station broadcasts that information.
My other complaint is the small size of the six preset buttons which take more precision to press. I miss the larger sized buttons on my stock deck, which incidentally also had tactile protrusions which identified the buttons by feel. On the pioneer deck, I absolutely must take my eyes off the road and aim at the intended button.
CD PLAYER
Pushing a release button on the faceplate causes it to turn down revealing the CD loading gap. Easy to eject and load, the loading of disks is pretty trouble free. Streamlining CD loading simply meant I needed to buy a sun visor open CD case for my car.
For normal audio CDs, the player spins them up as quick as a normal CD player would and you're off and running. Quality is good. There is a feature allows you to scan the first few seconds of each song; a feature I have yet to use. You can play the tracks in order, shuffled, repeat all, and repeat 1. The CD player works well, does its job, and doesn't stand out above the multitude of also-good players.
For mp3 and wma (these are compressed digital formats that you get from your computer), the files are smaller and thus about 10 times as many songs in mp3/wma format will fit on a CDR compared to the regular CD audio format. When you first insert an mp3/wma CD, the deck takes about 5 seconds to scan the disk for the directory format (since you can arrange your files in folders). No matter how they are arranged, however, the deck peruses each folder as if they were all on the same level. Another words, if you have folders A, B, and C; where A actually contains folders AA and AB, then the folders will be enumerated as: AA, AB, B, and C (1,2,3,4). Since the mp3/wma files contains song/track/artist info, this will be displayed while the song plays (if you choose). Quality is the same as the CD (same D/A converters I assume) and dependent upon the mp3/wma compression quality. I've successfully played CDR's from multiple sources without problems.
FACEPLATE
The detachable faceplate comes off quickly and easily and just as quickly and easily is snapped back on. The only knob that sticks out is the volume knob which can be pressed in for a flush faceplate, making it more compact. Some of the buttons are really small and take a serious look by the driver to locate and press. The recessable volume knob is analog like and the removable faceplate displays a blue back lit whitish-blue LCD that turns out to be easy to see both at night and day time.
My biggest complaint about the display is that you can't display both clock and current station at the same time. You have to toggle a display button to see both. In contrast, my stock Honda deck was able to display both at the same time for quick glances to find out the desired information. Instead of spending display area on the more superficial twin volume level bar, I would have preferred a single volume bar and a mini clock.
EQUALIZER and IMAGING CONTROL
These features, by far, are what has made me happy with the Pioneer deck. As I said before, decks in this price range all sound about the same. But this deck has EQ controls which give a lot of power to the user without actually having a 12 channel equalizer. It also keeps it in 3 levels of difficulty depending upon your technical level.
The first level, which is the easiest and affords the least amount of control is the EQ presets: flat, powerful, big bass, vocal, and custom. The first four are fixed EQ settings that you can quickly achieve at the press of the EQ button. Custom is for storing your own EQ setting. I would have liked to see custom1, custom2, custom3, but it has turned out that one custom EQ setting is fine.
The second level of control is actually controlling the 3 bands "highs", "mids", and "lows". There are +/- 6 levels of granularity and what's great is you can use any of the four presets as starting points. Once you adjust the EQ from the presets, you are now programming the custom preset. This makes EQ adjustments easier because you start with the preset that's closest to what you want, then fine tune from there.
The third level of adjustment is the ability to actually MOVE what frequency the low/mid/high EQ points are that are being adjusted. The center point of adjustments for low are 40/80/120/200 Hz. Mids are 200/400/800/1.5k Hz. Highs are 1.6k/5k/12k/16k. In addition, you also get to adjust the Q value in four increments which adjusts the width of the frequency band that is adjusted. Another words, a wide band of +6 low at 80 Hz will pump up the bass in a range of about 20-120 Hz (with 80 being the highest in the center) while a narrow band of +3 high at 1.6k Hz will only boost the sound frequencies from about 1.4 to 1.8. I didn't actually measure this, but this is for illustrating my point.
What this effectively meant for me, is that I could balance out my speakers by moving the adjustment points to where my speakers needed it, resulting in a more even response than I would have thought possible with the cost of the system I have. Excellent!
A loudness button has three levels of "loudness". Loudness smudges out the bottom end of the sound to make the music sound fuller with bigger bass, usually at the cost of having muddier sound. I keep mine set at Low loudness
On top of this, I made the mistake of buying "mismatched" front and rear speakers. My rear speakers were of a higher sensitivity that the fronts which resulted in the sound from the rear overpowering the front, making it like I had my back towards the sound; no one listens to a concert this way. Fading would not work because fading forward took power away from the rears which were producing all my bass. Luckily, this deck has a feature called "front image enhancement" which is effectively a low pass crossover for the rear. When enabled, the rear only get sound below 60, 140, or 250 Hz according to the user's setting. This way, the front speaker take all the work of producing the sound above this range. It's not a perfect solution bad speaker set up, but it was better than nothing. Pioneer to the rescue!
SUMMARY
Overall, this is a good deck with competitive audio quality in the price range. It's compatible with multiple CDR mp3/wma formats. The feature that stands out is the equalizer control. I'm quite happy with this deck.
Originally, I wanted the Alpine CDA-9827, due to Alpine's excellent reputation for quality sound. I was really budgeting for a $150-200 range deck, and within that range, it's really hard to distinguish audio differences between the decks. I believe that car audio, just like the more precise home audio, is largely dependent upon the quality of the SPEAKERS, as they are weakest link. My budget only afforded me some Kenwood 6.5 ($80) front speakers and JBL GTO926 6x9's ($140) for the rear as factory replacements. To balance this set, the $150-200 deck price range seemed about right.
Besides the Alpine, I also liked this Pioneer deck for the bang for buck. Besides good sound quality, the sound control functions set this deck apart.
FEATURES
This deck features four 22W RMS per channel and can play regular audio CDs and CD-R's with mp3's and wma's on it. It's able to display the titles and has a 3 adjustable band (+6/-6) equalizer and 4 preset EQ settings. A tri level loudness control allows you to smudge out the bass for a simulated bigger bass sound. There are 6 preset buttons and four groups (FM1, FM2, FM3, and AM). The deck also has four line level RCA outputs for hooking up an external power amp if desired.
RADIO
I'm still using my stock antenna and radio reception is disappointingly slightly worse than the stock Honda deck in my 97 Civic. I can clearly hear the static in the channels, and weaker stations seem to have a harder time being picked up. Even so, reception is good enough that I don't feel that the deck fails in this category.
Tuning is done digitally in 0.1 FM increments and search annoyingly requires that you hold down the tune up/down buttons for a couple seconds for each seek. There is a scan mode which automatically programs one group of presets (ie. FM3) but since most metropolitan areas have significantly more than just 6 strong stations this feature is largely useless unless you're in rural areas. The radio does have station identifier information which is nice if the station broadcasts that information.
My other complaint is the small size of the six preset buttons which take more precision to press. I miss the larger sized buttons on my stock deck, which incidentally also had tactile protrusions which identified the buttons by feel. On the pioneer deck, I absolutely must take my eyes off the road and aim at the intended button.
CD PLAYER
Pushing a release button on the faceplate causes it to turn down revealing the CD loading gap. Easy to eject and load, the loading of disks is pretty trouble free. Streamlining CD loading simply meant I needed to buy a sun visor open CD case for my car.
For normal audio CDs, the player spins them up as quick as a normal CD player would and you're off and running. Quality is good. There is a feature allows you to scan the first few seconds of each song; a feature I have yet to use. You can play the tracks in order, shuffled, repeat all, and repeat 1. The CD player works well, does its job, and doesn't stand out above the multitude of also-good players.
For mp3 and wma (these are compressed digital formats that you get from your computer), the files are smaller and thus about 10 times as many songs in mp3/wma format will fit on a CDR compared to the regular CD audio format. When you first insert an mp3/wma CD, the deck takes about 5 seconds to scan the disk for the directory format (since you can arrange your files in folders). No matter how they are arranged, however, the deck peruses each folder as if they were all on the same level. Another words, if you have folders A, B, and C; where A actually contains folders AA and AB, then the folders will be enumerated as: AA, AB, B, and C (1,2,3,4). Since the mp3/wma files contains song/track/artist info, this will be displayed while the song plays (if you choose). Quality is the same as the CD (same D/A converters I assume) and dependent upon the mp3/wma compression quality. I've successfully played CDR's from multiple sources without problems.
FACEPLATE
The detachable faceplate comes off quickly and easily and just as quickly and easily is snapped back on. The only knob that sticks out is the volume knob which can be pressed in for a flush faceplate, making it more compact. Some of the buttons are really small and take a serious look by the driver to locate and press. The recessable volume knob is analog like and the removable faceplate displays a blue back lit whitish-blue LCD that turns out to be easy to see both at night and day time.
My biggest complaint about the display is that you can't display both clock and current station at the same time. You have to toggle a display button to see both. In contrast, my stock Honda deck was able to display both at the same time for quick glances to find out the desired information. Instead of spending display area on the more superficial twin volume level bar, I would have preferred a single volume bar and a mini clock.
EQUALIZER and IMAGING CONTROL
These features, by far, are what has made me happy with the Pioneer deck. As I said before, decks in this price range all sound about the same. But this deck has EQ controls which give a lot of power to the user without actually having a 12 channel equalizer. It also keeps it in 3 levels of difficulty depending upon your technical level.
The first level, which is the easiest and affords the least amount of control is the EQ presets: flat, powerful, big bass, vocal, and custom. The first four are fixed EQ settings that you can quickly achieve at the press of the EQ button. Custom is for storing your own EQ setting. I would have liked to see custom1, custom2, custom3, but it has turned out that one custom EQ setting is fine.
The second level of control is actually controlling the 3 bands "highs", "mids", and "lows". There are +/- 6 levels of granularity and what's great is you can use any of the four presets as starting points. Once you adjust the EQ from the presets, you are now programming the custom preset. This makes EQ adjustments easier because you start with the preset that's closest to what you want, then fine tune from there.
The third level of adjustment is the ability to actually MOVE what frequency the low/mid/high EQ points are that are being adjusted. The center point of adjustments for low are 40/80/120/200 Hz. Mids are 200/400/800/1.5k Hz. Highs are 1.6k/5k/12k/16k. In addition, you also get to adjust the Q value in four increments which adjusts the width of the frequency band that is adjusted. Another words, a wide band of +6 low at 80 Hz will pump up the bass in a range of about 20-120 Hz (with 80 being the highest in the center) while a narrow band of +3 high at 1.6k Hz will only boost the sound frequencies from about 1.4 to 1.8. I didn't actually measure this, but this is for illustrating my point.
What this effectively meant for me, is that I could balance out my speakers by moving the adjustment points to where my speakers needed it, resulting in a more even response than I would have thought possible with the cost of the system I have. Excellent!
A loudness button has three levels of "loudness". Loudness smudges out the bottom end of the sound to make the music sound fuller with bigger bass, usually at the cost of having muddier sound. I keep mine set at Low loudness
On top of this, I made the mistake of buying "mismatched" front and rear speakers. My rear speakers were of a higher sensitivity that the fronts which resulted in the sound from the rear overpowering the front, making it like I had my back towards the sound; no one listens to a concert this way. Fading would not work because fading forward took power away from the rears which were producing all my bass. Luckily, this deck has a feature called "front image enhancement" which is effectively a low pass crossover for the rear. When enabled, the rear only get sound below 60, 140, or 250 Hz according to the user's setting. This way, the front speaker take all the work of producing the sound above this range. It's not a perfect solution bad speaker set up, but it was better than nothing. Pioneer to the rescue!
SUMMARY
Overall, this is a good deck with competitive audio quality in the price range. It's compatible with multiple CDR mp3/wma formats. The feature that stands out is the equalizer control. I'm quite happy with this deck.
