In my last review I hadn't yet tried the CD player part of this head-unit. Over the weekend, we had a chance to give it a shot. I prepared a bunch of podcasts on a CD. I transcoded all of the audio files into MP3 at either 56 Kbps or 64 Kbps mono and stereo. Some of them had to be transcoded since they were in .m4a format and the rest I did because of the playback problems with the USB keys.

We had no technical problems using the CD player with MP3s. We did have some problems, though. However, first on to the good stuff. With the CD player, MP3s can be fast forwarded and rewound. It only skips about 15 seconds at time, so it still takes a while to move forward a half an hour in a podcast, but it works. This moves into some of the bad stuff.

The lack of keeping its spot where it was playing is a problem for doing simple tasks like stopping the car to get fuel. If I switch to using MP3 CDs only I may still break up the podcasts into 10 segments or something (then the +10 track button will still move forward a whole file and be useful).

The sound on many podcasts is not very professional. Different people would be at drastically different levels. For a normal podcast, sending the audio through a sound compressor would probably work fine to limit the range, but that's yet another annoying step -- and it's not the problem of the player. Professional podcasts or broadcast recordings are usually fine.

Another annoying thing with the volume that we discovered also had nothing to do with the head unit but to do with the Jeep. We have the overhead sound bar. As it turns out, it pipes much more sound to the rear passengers than the front. Spoken word needs to be louder in many cases due to road noise than music does. When we couldn't hear the sound the rear passenger complained of it being painfully loud. Part of this was the constantly changing volume in some of the podcasts. However, part was just a lack of good front speakers in the Jeep. I could fade it forward some but it just caused a good loss of volume -- and turning it back up defeated the point.

In daily commuting, the CD has been working well. I wish the unit would tell me duration left of an MP3 file and I wish there was a way to manually cycle through the information displayed -- and I wish it wouldn't display information when all it's going to do is say "unknown."

In any case, I still haven't tried any non-USB 2.0 memory keys yet. Now that I know the MP3 playback does work fairly well I know that it has something to do with the USB connection or the memory keys themselves. More to come...

Shane Conder's Whateveritis of Nothing: MegaSound VRCD300-USB Review

Posted by Shane on August 31, 2005 9:17 AM | Permalink