lydon71's Full Review: Dual Electronics XDM6830 Car CD/ MP3 Player
All my life I have been stuck on JVC. But this time I wanted very specific features and this unit had everything I wanted at a great price, so I figured I would give Dual a try.
Insulation was the same as with any unit, fit it into the bracket and connect the wires to the harness and there you go.
There are a lot of features that this unit has that I would have never even thought to want in a radio but have grown to like very much. The biggest of these is the power on volume level. You can set it so that every time you power on it comes on at the volume that you have programmed in. No more shocks from turning on the car and forgetting that you left the volume up loud when you turned the car off.
The 3 biggest things I was looking for when I bought this were 1) an auxiliary input jack 2) remote and 3) enough power without going overboard.
1) this comes with the aux input and a nifty little I-plug that mounts anywhere in the car that is convenient for you. All you need to do is plug a patch cable from your MP3 player, satellite etc into the I-plug jack and you are good to go.
2) This comes with a remote that does every function you realistically need it to
3) 200 watts max (50X4) is plenty for me. I have had higher powered units in the past and realized that I was wasting my money buying more power than I actually used
The sound quality is very good, I use the Phantom Of The Opera as a baseline when testing radios, and the Dual did a great job at hitting all the highs and lows, it did start to distort a little at full volume but I think that is probably my speakers rather than the unit.
This unit plays regular audio CD's as well as CD-R data CD's that contain MP3's and WMA's. This is not something I was looking for but have already found myself using it quite a bit. I love that it can read ID3 tags and show any song info you could want. The navigation of songs is a bit cumbersome and has a rather large learning curve but I got the hang of it after about a week. Reading the owners manual will help you out a lot in this area.
Now this part is a bit frivolous and gimmicky but I really really like it. The slot to put in the CD is actually behind the front panel, you push a button and the motorized front panel slides down to reveal the slot. This allows the face to be larger and easier to read.
The radio part of it is your standard radio. Not much could really be done to impress me here, 12 AM and 18 FM presets (I think), preset and regular scan, seek and manual tuning, local and DX settings, US and European switching. All the standards you have grown accustom to. It pulls in every station that I listen to perfectly, one of which I could only get here and there with my last radio so props there.
Sound settings include 5 preset EQ's or you can put in your own. A nice feature for some would be that you can preset it so that each input has a default EQ. EX the radio can be set to one EQ while the CD can be set to another.
It has a removable face if that is a feature you are looking for, I don't actually use this feature and left the face screwed in as "semi permanent"
Overall I love this radio, it has met or exceeded all my requirements and expectations. And I still can not get over the price.
I really don't have anything bad to say about it but for the sake of not being overly positive I was a little put out at having to learn how to navigate my MP3 CD's but that's really just because I don't like to have to read the manual.
Now there are better units out there with more power etc etc etc but this unit has everything that the average person will need, for 90% of the world buying anything more is really just overkill and a waste of money.
I paid 129.99 for this from Crutchfield, you can find if for less elsewhere but Crutchfield includes the wire harness, mounting kit, instlation instructions and free shipping. In the end it actually cost less than buying from another vendor and buying each piece seperatly and paying shipping.
Update
After more use and now that we are into winter I have found that when the CD player is cold (25 degrees or less) the CD will skip on big bumps in the road (I also drive a Jeep so bumps can be kind of rough sometimes). The radio heats up in about 10 minutes and all is well again.
This could be a factor to some people but as far as I'm concerned it's a "non issue" and I still think this radio is top notch for the $.
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