Aiwa CDC-X304 Car CD Player

Important update!

Although I am very happy with the features and music performance of this player, after only a couple of months I have started to have a lot of problems with it, which no longer allows me to recommend it to anyone.

It's only been about 5 months since I bought the player and it is already plagued by a really bizarre problem. The control buttons on the faceplate would have a totally random operation - especially the source and the power buttons. The deck would either not respond to them, or their operation will be reversed, i.e. the power button performs the functions for the source button and vice versa. I've also noticed that problem with the volume knob, which would occasionally function by its own will, and will turn the volume down when I intend to turn it up or the other way around, or it will call the menu functions. Since these problems started to appear a few weeks ago, I've had to reset the player many times, durig which I lose all of my presets, as well as the stored stations and clock setting. I am extremely disappointed with this player, because it was a really good performer and I love its design and auxiliary input too.





A little update! After a couple of days with this player in my car, I finally figured out the logic of the menu system. It's actually a nice concept but it takes some time getting used to it to understand and appreciate it. There are actually two different sets of menus - one for the sounds controls (bass, treble, balance, etc), and another for the system set up (display dimmer, beep tone, and so on). If you just press the menu button quickly, you'll call the sound control menu, and if you press and hold it then you'll get the second menu. After you've called one or the other menu you can select sub menus with the tunning/track buttons. Also when you first call one of the menus it starts from the sub menu that you've adjusted last. Actually it is not a bad system, but because you can't always remember what you've messed around with last you're never quite sure what menu will show up and which way to go to the one you need. On the other hand if you use one sub menu more than the others you'll have a quicker access to it most of the time. After getting used to this menu system I think I like it more than the standard "scroll through everything" approach.




Ok, I admit it – I am a dork! Every so often I just get the itch to buy some new electronics, even though I might not need them. It's just so hard to resist when I get some new idea in my head I have to make it happen. So just that kind of a new idea made me buy this Aiwa player, which would be the no less but 5th deck I install in my car in the last year, and it's not that I didn't like my old one – a Panasonic, which was a great player – but it didn't have one particular feature that the Aiwa does: an auxiliary input. I know that you probably don't care about my story but I'll tell you anyway. My annual itch for a new cell phone had started showing up really bad lately, but I was really happy with my old phone, and my company offered to knock off $5 every month off my bill so I really wanted to keep it. But the problem was that my phone doesn't have a built in speaker phone, and my car being a stick shift, it's really hard to drive and talk at the same time, which is one of life's guilty pleasures. So I started brainstorming an idea of turning my existing cell phone into a speaker phone of its own. The existing accessories, however, were either too expansive, or too simple and un-cool to satisfy my desires. So I came up with the idea to hook up my phone to the car radio, which btw is very hard to find the right cables for. After searching and researching for a while I found out that there were two options: one was to buy a little clip-on transmitter, which uses radio frequencies to send the phone conversation to a selected FM station. I tried that, but unfortunately the transmitter only works on 2 frequencies and both of those were already taken by radio stations, so there was an awful lot of static and interference. On top of that the little adapter was kind of bulky and not very attractive. The other option was to somehow find a cable that can be connected to my phone's headset jack with a 2.5mm plug and a car radio with an auxiliary input. The cable with the 2.5mm plug on one side, and 3.5mm on the other (which is the standard headphone size) is very hard to find, but I managed to make it work with an additional adapter found at RadioShack. Both the cable and the adaptor cost about $10 combined so compared to anything else this really cheap. Now the problem was that my Panasonic CD player didn't have an input connection. So naturally I had to buy a new one. Ultimately I would have liked to have something with the inputs on the rear and not on the front panel, because on the front panel you'll have the jack sticking out and that will be farther from the well integrated look I was trying to achieve, but considering the prices, and the practicality of the front panel input I decided to compromise. There was another model at the same price with the rear inputs, but it was made by Dual – a brand I am not too sure about, and with s/n ratio of only 85db, which is not really impressive for a CD player. So my final choice was this Aiwa, which happened to be on sale at Best Buy for roughly $100, plus they gave me a pair of free speakers, which I was pretty happy about, because my old Pioneers in the front were just plain paper-cone speakers, desperately needing to be replaced.

So armed with the new Aiwa deck, and speakers, I headed back home for my weekend project. Best Buy did offer a free installation with the deck too, but "free" always has a different meaning for those guys, and they always somehow come up with some extra $50 for God only knows what, but they still call it "free". As I mentioned earlier I had already done this a few too many times, so I knew what I was doing, and preferred to do it myself and wait for Best Buy to take their sweet time and charge me bogus little fees for this and that. If you've ever done it you probably know that installing a car deck is neither easy, nor particularly pleasant job, and depending on your car model it could be pretty intimidating. On my Ford Probe it's not too hard, but you do have to take a lot of pieces out to be able to reach the dash. I was glad to find that this deck though, had some design features making it somewhat simpler to install than any of the previous ones I had done. Some of the wires came already prepared for connections, and there was one less wire to connect, something about the cars amplifier, which again is model dependant and might not apply to you anyway, but on my car I've had to do it with every other model before. After about 30 min it was already installed and ready for the test. I am very proud to report that everything worked as planned. I finished changing the front door speakers too, and was ready to try out my little cell phone connection. Ah! It was awesome! Everything worked perfectly, the reception was loud and clear, there was no interference, and it looked almost as good as a factory installed car kit. I can't tell you how thrilled I get when my brilliant ideas work out well.

Now let me write a few words for the player's performance. As I already mentioned I was perfectly happy with my Panasonic player as far as CD quality was concerned. But when I turned on the Aiwa I was totally blown away. It is rated at 23 watts of RMS power, and 52 peak. In comparison the Panasonic was rated at 20 RMS/45 peak. The extra couple of watts made an enormous difference. The sounded came out so much cleaner and strong, and particularly the bass response was improved dramatically. The Aiwa also has a better S/N ratio of 120 db compared to 95 on the Panasonic, which is still pretty good, but you can definitely feel the difference. Basically everything I liked about the Panasonic, was the same on the Aiwa except better. The display was larger and easier to read, and it also could be selected to show either the clock or the radio or CD information. The Aiwa just like the Panasonic has the convenient rotary knob for easy control. A couple of features that I really appreciate are the dedicated OFF button. Lately I've noticed a trend in the car players to use the same button for source selection, and power, so when you want to turn the player off you always have to hold down the button a few second longer instead of just pressing it quickly and have the job done. Call me nit-picky but for some reason that always annoys me. I also like a lot the preset equalizer modes. I know some would agree some won't, but the player gives you no less than 7 different settings, and chances are that at least one of the will be what you're looking for. The other little feature that I think is very well designed is the face plate release button. On my Panasonic player, the button for the face plate release was located right next to the eject button, and very often I would push the wrong one. On the Aiwa this face plate release button is neatly tucked away in the bottom corner, far from any kind of essential controls. Another really nice touch is the radio tuning. Somebody said in their review here that there's no manual tuning mode, which is not true. There is a manual tuning mode you just have to know how to use it. Pressing down and holding the tuning buttons changes between the modes – auto search, and manual search. The really cool addition here is the local station auto mode, this make the radio tune in only the station that come strong, and bypasses all the little stops that most tuners make on every distant signal they pick up. I am really impressed also by the tuner's sensitivity, which is by far the best one on any of the players I've had. The FM sensitivity is rated at 9db (unlike most measure, here the smaller the number is the better, typical radios are rated around 12db).

Now a few minor complaints I have. Like any piece of electronic equipment there always seems to be something that could have been made better. The most important omission here to me is the lack of direct track access. While in CD mode the 1-6 buttons are completely inactive. Most brands would at least give some functions to some of those buttons, like random play or repeat, or something like that. On this player those functions have dedicated buttons, and the 1-6 buttons serve absolutely no purpose for the CD operation, which to me is a total waste of real estate. The buttons are only used for the radio presets.
Also related to that are the buttons for the tuning and track selection. They are a bit small and hidden behind the big rotary knob, but their touch operation is very well adjusted and once you get used to their position are actually pretty comfortable to operate. The player also lacks a dedicated play/pause button, there's no pause option at all, and there's no mute button either. There is an attenuator which, however, only reduced the volume by 10db so if you want to completely mute the sound you have to turn it off. There are also no dedicated buttons for the different sources, and you have to keep pushing the source button until the desired one appears. A minor inconvenience, but would've been nice to think about it. And the last problem that I would agree with the other reviewers is the menu system. It seems a bit random, and depends on the source and sound mode you're in, so when you press that menu button you never really know what exactly you're going to get. Also instead of just pressing the same big knob to circle the different options, which I would've preferred, you have to press the menu button to call the menu, and then circle through the options with the smaller tune/track buttons next too it. Luckily once you set those you don't really need to fiddle with them much more so it's not such a big deal. The display dimmer I guess is a nice touch too, although I like it bright so I have no intentions on using it. The player looks totally cool at night. By the way it's really not that hard to dim the display – just press and hold the menu button – that takes you directly to the dimmer menu and from there all you have to do is rotate the knob to select the display brightness.

All in all I have to say that I am thrilled with this Aiwa. I intend some time in the future to add a DVD player in my car, which now I can also connect to the aux input. I know that people would probably laugh at me because I change the radio players more frequently than I change the radio stations, but playing with electronics brings me an enormous pleasure.