Jason Dunn
10-03-2005, 05:00 PM
There are some people that know a great deal about car audio I'm not one of them. But what I do know is that the vast majority of factory car decks are incapable of playing anything other than regular CDs. When I buy a CD, I rip it, and it goes onto the CD rack never to be touched again (for the most part). Once I have the music in digital format, I prefer to keep it that way. Over the years I've experimented with various solutions for getting my digital audio pumping through my car speaker system a long drive without the tunes is just painful. <br /><br />In my previous car, I had a deck installed that featured a front 3.5mm audio input jack, which allowed me to run a cable from my Pocket PC to the stereo. It was a simple solution, but still required two things: a cable, and a device for playback. I've also tried several wireless radio transmitters, which worked with any deck, but that solution still required a playback device and the wireless transmitter itself. That means you need to think about recharging the devices before using them, and remembering to bring them with you. I wanted something even more straightforward, so in 2003 I began looking at car decks capable of playing variable bit rate Windows Media 9 WMA files the format I was ripping in. I was surprised at the number of decks that claimed WMA compatibility, but choked on the test CD I had burned. Frustrated, I gave up.<!><br /><br />In 2004 after buying a new car, I decided to see if things had gotten any better lucky for me, they had. My test CD worked in most of the decks I tried, and after some comparisons between Sony, Pioneer, and Panasonic decks, I decided upon the Panasonic CQ-C8400U. I wasn't going to replace the speakers in my Mazda Protιgι 5 until after I had heard what they were capable of with a new deck driving them the Panasonic offers a 60 x 4 watt solution, so there was decent headroom for future expansion. The deck itself is nicely designed, with a large dot-matrix display. The animation mode with zooming plans and racing cars is impressive at first, but not surprisingly it's a gimmick that I grew tired of fairly quickly. What's more useful is the text display that gives you the artist and song information from MP3 and WMA files. Unfortunately, it reads this data from the file information, not the ID3 meta tags. This means that since I have my folders named "Artist Album" and the song titles "(Artist) Song", I end up with a lot of redundant information on the display and significant scrolling before I can see the information I want. The screen has three position modes for those of you that like that sort of thing, and the faceplate comes off for taking it with you. Strangely enough, I've never figured out how to turn it completely off. I haven't checked the manual, but no amount of pressing and holding on various buttons has allows me to turn the entire deck off. I've opted to switch it to a blank input source instead.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/panasonic-mp3wmaplayer-carstereo-big.JPG"><img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/panasonic-mp3wmaplayer-carstereo.jpg" /></a><br /><i>Figure 1: The Panasonic CQ-C8400U. Click for a full-sized image (2.1 MB)</i><br /><br />The Panasonic CQ-C8400U is capable of playing any audio file I throw at it from 64 KBPS WMA to 256 KBPS MP3, and had no trouble with variable bit rate songs. What it does have trouble with though is certain brands of CDs and/or the speed at which the CD is burned. If faced with a disc it cannot read properly, sometimes it will start playing a song, they stop halfway through, and other times it won't play at all. I did a fair amount of testing, and it seemed to have trouble with a generic brand of CDs that I was using. When I switched to Ritek CDs, I had no problems. It also worked well with the Verbatim LightScribe CDs.<br /><br />Overall, I'm satisfied with this purchase. It would be great to see a version of this deck that could read DVD discs because I rip at a high bit rate, I can typically only fit six to eight albums on a single CD, so a DVD would allow me to carry more music. One thing I enjoy doing is burning a CD with as many albums as I can fit, then using either my LightScribe CD burner or my Epson printer to burn images of the album covers onto the front of the disc. This makes for a highly personalized disc that shows what albums are on the disc. If you like to keep your CDs safe at home, while having the ability to carry more music per disc, this is a good solution.<br /><br /><i>Jason Dunn owns and operates <a href="http://www.thoughtsmedia.com">Thoughts Media Inc.</a>, a company dedicated to creating the best in online communities. He enjoys mobile devices, digital media content creation/editing, and pretty much all technology. He lives in Alberta, Canada.</i>