Sanyo EXCD-1000 Car CD / Cassette Player

About half a year ago my car stereo was stolen, so off I went in search of a replacement. I decided I wanted a combo CD-cassette head unit, but I only wanted it in a single-height unit for my '94 Honda Accord. At the time, the Excedio was the only choice so I snapped it up. What I found over the past six months is that the player definitely has a balance of strengths and weaknesses.

*** Strengths (+):
+ The obvious strength is that it's a combo CD-cassette unit in a single-height enclosure, which is still relatively rare. I used to have a tape head unit along with a CD changer in the back, but now that I've had both up front I'm never going back to a changer; being able to change CD's is a great, great thing on long trips, particularly if you're like me and tend towards listening to parts of CD's and not whole albums at a time.
+ The sound quality of the Excedio is solid. I'm not a super audiophile, but when I turn up the music to reasonable volumes (i.e. not car thumping), it doesn't distort, and the details of the music are still crisp and clear. Plus, the xtra bass feature has three settings (off, level 1, and level 2) that each work well given the appropriate music.
+ Good, space-efficient design. At the press of a button, the face plate flips down - it's not motorized, BTW - and reveals the CD and cassette slots in the back, with the eject buttons for each on the back of the flipped-down face plate. Smart way to maximize display space on the front of the faceplate.
+ Various features. There are some good features built into the unit, like the function for automatically setting your radio preset stations to six of the strongest radio stations. This is nice if you drive from area to area, in and out of reach of various radio stations.

*** Weaknesses (-):
- The display isn't readable in bright daylight. This isn't a huge problem if, like me, you tend to keep your eyes on the road instead of trying to read the display and look for tracks in a serial fashion, i.e. "This isn't the right song. Go on to the next.", vs. skipping right to a track, i.e. "I want track 10. I'm on track 4 now so I have to press the button 6 times." But given the number of other car stereo displays that _are_ visible in daylight, this quirk seems a little odd.
- Track change / fast forward+rewind buttons are not responsive. Something that definitely takes some getting used to is that there's a delay between when you push the CD track change buttons and when the track actually changes. So I'll press the button and hear a beep, but the same track will keep playing for about a second before the track actually changes. This is irritating when you don't hear the beep and wind up pressing the button again (a common problem when the music's up loud), leaving you one track past where you wanted to be. This is also problematic when you're trying to skip multiple tracks, because you actually have to count beeps rather than being able to immediately hear on each button press which track you're on.
- Unintuitive layout of controls. My main gripe here is with the location of the source change control buttons - CD, tape, and radio. One would think they would be all in a row or combined into one source change button or, at the very least, be in the same general location. Unfortunately, this is not the case. The radio source button is on the left, between the track change buttons, while the CD button is on the top right and the tape button is in the middle right. This is particularly frustrating when you're fast-forwarding or rewinding a tape. To stop it from rewinding, for example, you can't just press the rewind button again - you have to press the tape button. Unfortunately, it's on the other side of the faceplate, and the button is small - about the size of a tic-tac - and not terribly well labeled (it doesn't say "tape", it's just two arrow heads back to back in a diamond shape). Inevitably, you must take your eyes off the road to look at the faceplate. In my book, any time you have to take your eyes off the road to perform a basic operation on the stereo, it's an indication of bad design.
- Certain feature labels are painted on and thus are not visible at night. For example, the track repeat button is radio preset button 3. However, at night the label isn't backlit, so you have to randomly press radio preset buttons until you stumble upon the function you were looking for.
- No scan feature on the radio. Some people won't care, but for me it's aggravating to have to keep one finger on the radio tune button while driving when all I want to do is scan the wavelengths for a good song. On my wife's Cabriolet it's a simple matter of pressing "scan", waiting for a good song to come into focus, and then pressing "scan" again.
- The unit doesn't play well with CD-R's. I've had some success with burning CD-R's at 1x speed, but inevitably in the second half of the CD the audio starts getting choppy and then just brings up an error on the display. This is a big downer for me, since I like to burn mixes of my music and tend not to listen to albums all the way through.

I know there's a lot of weaknesses compared to positives, but remember this bottom line: if you need a single-height combo CD+cassette, this is practically your only choice (besides the recently released Sanyo FXCD-500, which looks like the Excedio's little brother). Thankfully, it's not a bad choice. But if you're just going to be using the CD player or cassette player or don't care whether it's a single height or double height unit, I recommend getting a different unit.