Pros: Line input jack, decodes MP3 and WMA files, plays CD-ROM, CD-R and CD-RW
Cons: So many buttons, so few fingers on my hand, so little memory in my mind
The Bottom Line: Very capable car receiver; it produces great sound, has amazing compatibility with CD media and various bitrates of MP3 and WMA files, and features a very useful line-in jack.
towwang's Full Review: Dual Electronics XDM-6220 Car CD/ MP3 Player
In this review: installation issues and tips, user interface, sound quality of tuner, audio CDs, MP3 files, and external MP3 player, suitability and fitness.
I bought the XDM-6220 to replace the factory-installed radio in my car. My old radio was just that, an AM FM tuner, with no cassette player or line input to allow any decent connectivity with an external CD or MP3 player. After reading so many reviews of noisy FM transmitters and some badly engineered FM modulators that don't block the antenna signal, I decided that a new receiver with a real line-level input was a must-have feature. As I shopped for compatible receivers, I found two web sites worth sharing:
1) "www.MP3YourCar.com" lets you enter you car's manufacturer, model and year, and will show you a list of compatible (or at least usable) audio accessories, mainly geared towards connectivity of MP3 players with your existing car stereo. It was here that I learned about WIRED FM modulators, their advantages over FM transmitters, and (indirectly) the shortcomings that killed my interest in this solution.
2) "www.Crutchfield.com", also with an excellent database searchable by car manufacturer/model/year, that is oriented more towards an overhaul (i.e. replacement) of your car stereo. Its selection of compatible receivers, CD changers, amplifiers and satellite radio tuners is excellent, and prices are average to good.
It was at this second web site that I came upon this company called "Dual" (web site at "www.DualAV.com"), with an impressive product line of CD receivers that packed a lot of features and functionality, did not seem to compromise on sound quality (in paper at least), and seemed to give the competition a serious run for their money. Dual's receiver line can be generalized into 3 tiers:
1) Low-end: just your basic CD player (with CD-RW compatibility) and an integrated low-power amplifier.
2) Mid-range: wherein the CD player can play data CD's with MP3 and WMA files, and has line-input jack.
3) High-end: motorized detachable faceplate, high-power amplifier, XM controller.
Within this product line, the XDM-6220 is just barely within their mid-range products. It will play
1) Audio CDs
2) MP3 and WMA files from CD-R and CD-RW
3) Audio from any external source with an analog line-level output
4) And of course, AM and FM radio stations
Product details can still be found at:
http://www.dualav.com/receivers/XDM-6220.html
I say "still" because this model is no longer linked from their main catalog page and may have been discontinued. (Boy do I love obsolescence!)
[The package]
The retail box of the XDM-6220 includes:
1) XDM-6220 main unit
2) Mounting kit ("cage"), keys and screws
3) iPlug cable (basically a Y-adapter converting RCA line-in jacks into a female stereo mini-jack)
4) Detachable faceplate with detachable rim
5) Manual and registration card
The box is very neatly packed, and all screws and small parts are segregated into individual pouches to facilitate their identification, and to prevent them from scratching other parts in the box. The packaging gave a very good first impression.
The user's manual is just barely adequate in its coverage of installation, and average in its explanation of the features and operation of the XDM-6220. It devotes a mere two pages to installation: one on preparing the unit for installation, and another with a full page wiring diagram. It definitely assumes the reader is experienced with car audio installation (which I was not).
Only upon reading the manual did I realize that this unit also has a clock. How did I live without one in the car for so many years?!
[Installation]
The manual shows you clearly the preliminary steps of installation. You have to use the two included metal "keys" (flat bars) to pry the main unit out of a mounting cage. Some cars require this cage to fasten the main unit to the dashboard, but in my case it was not needed. You then have to remove two screws holding a label on the top of the unit. For some strange reason, my clueless mind thought that this meant I only needed to loosen the screws, remove the label, and replace the screws. Turned out that these protective screws fastened the internal CD injection mechanism, so for not removing them I was rewarded with a constant ejection of any CD I tried to insert into the unit.
Installation into my car entailed the following steps:
1) Connecting the wires. The wires coming out of the back of the XDM-6220 are nicely color-coded, and the manuaI's diagram shows clearly which pair of wires is for what speaker. Unfortunately not the same can be said of the wires gathered by a proprietary connector for factory-installed equipment. I managed to avoid destroying the proprietary connectors that fit the old radio, by prying the pins out of the connector, but in order to figure out the pin-out, I had to disassemble the old radio. Its circuit board had each pin clearly labeled. From then on, it was just a slightly tedious process of matching wire to wire.
One problem I did have was that two pairs of wires coming from the XDM-6220 are "visually challenging". According to the manual, one pair for a front speaker is supposed to be gray, and another pair for a rear speaker green. The actual wires are very light gray (almost aquamarine green, I thought) for one pair, and dark green for the other pair, so dark it is almost gray. I got these pairs mixed up, and chuckled when I noticed how the fader and the balance adjustments had their functions swapped.
2) Affixing the mounting brackets (which I removed from the old radio) onto the XDM-6220. This took a few minutes to figure out, because the side panels of the XDM-6220 look like swiss cheese: they are full of holes! There were at least a dozen positions in which I could affix the brackets on each side panel, and since I could not figure out at first the proper position of the brackets, I even tried to swap the brackets (which are not symmetrical by the way) between left and right. It was an interesting little puzzle, but worth solving, to ensure that the front panel will align properly with the dashboard.
3) Connecting the iPlug cable and routing the mini-jack to its final position. The iPlug cable is a generous 6 ft. long, allowing you to place the line-in jack of the XDM-6220 almost anywhere in your dashboard. It can be affixed to your dashboard with either a peel-off sticky surface on the underside of the female mini-jack (at one end of the cable), or with two included screws that can pierce through the dashboard's surface (ouch!). I opted to just pass the mini-jack through an unused removable panel of the dashboard and leave it partly dangling, in order to use the full length of this iPlug cable.
Once the wires and brackets were properly connected and fixated, I tested the unit, found all basic functionality to be in proper order, and reinstalled all the panels of the dashboard.
[Audio performance]
First function tested was the tuner. This was the only aspect of this product that left me disappointed. FM stereo reception sounded synthetic (like an MP3 file at 96 Kb/s) and very "tied down" (very constrained dynamic range, and poor stereo separation). The specifications for this product reveal that frequency response only reaches 13 KHz; they sure were not being modest! Sound quality is definitely worse than that of the radio I was replacing, but hey, I did not buy this thing to listen to the radio.
There is a setting for FM sensitivity called "local/DX". In the "local" mode, the tuner will scan past all but the strongest FM signals, and it was so "insensitive" that it would only stop at 6 stations out of the super-crowded frequency spectrum in a metropolitan area. Once I switched this setting to "DX", the tuner's scan function did a more reasonable job of stopping at every decently-sounding FM station.
Next I tested with a few audio CDs. They sounded great! Even though the factory-installed speakers I have are not high-end, they finally can shine (err, sound) in all their glory. As promised by the manual, standard audio tracks burned to CD-R and CD-RW played flawlessly.
My third test was the most important one: I did not mind the fact that this product is a single-disc CD player because I wanted to bring my portable MP3 player on the road, and have access to a large song library without having to shuffle discs or cassettes. I used a mini-jack male-male cable to connect the headphone output of the MP3 player to the iPlug, and began listening to a few MP3 files. Sound output remained excellent and noise-free, but was substantially quieter than that I heard while playing CDs or FM radio. Part of the problem is due to the low output level of the MP3 player (battery life is important there too!), so I had to turn its volume all the way up, and then increase the receiver's volume to about 50% in order to merely reach a comfortable listening level.
Throughout all my audio quality tests, I found that turning off all equalization yielded a weak-sounding output that is literally "flat". The XDM-6220 offers 5 preset equalization modes (jazz, vocal, classical, rock and pop), plus a "loudness" setting that can be considered a sixth equalization curve. Of all these, I liked "loudness" the best, because it worked equally well with classical music as with rock. I typically think it is a dumb idea to have just a few fixed equalization curves; if the sound processing chip can attenuate different frequency bands individually, why not let the user set the parameters? Fortunately, and in my subjective opinion, this shortcoming is somewhat made up for by the fact that with loudness turned on, the sound output was lively and to my liking.
[User interface]
The first thing you will notice when you begin to operate the XDM-6220 is that its faceplate is really crowded with buttons. And they are rather small and clumped together. This unit is not for people with thick fingers or who need to wear gloves while driving.
For the most basic tasks such as turning the unit on and off, tuning into different radio stations, and playing an audio CD, the user interface is quite self-explanatory. All the buttons are reasonably labelled with standard symbols (a triangle for "play", a square for "stop", etc.), even though there is no space to spell out each button's name. You can fast forward or rewind within a track of an audio CD, or you can jump from one track to another, but you cannot program the XDM-6220 to play the tracks in a certain order.
For the AM FM tuner, this receiver has a row of 10 buttons, of which 6 can be used to select preset stations in each of 5 memory bands (FM 1, 2 and 3, and AM 1 and 2), yielding a total of 30 preset stations that you can program into memory. Why did they have to make it 6 buttons times 5 bands, instead of all 10 buttons across 3 bands (which would make it easier to switch between AM and FM), is a question worthy of the same status as that of "What is the meaning of life?"
There is an auto-scan-and-program function, which supposedly lets the tuner find radio stations and program them for quick subsequent access with the preset buttons. The point is to save the user from the hassle of programming each preset manually, supposedly. I found that this feature was implemented in the most worthless manner possible, as the following takes place:
1) The unit sets FM sensitivity to "local", so it will only recognize the strongest station signals
2) From 87 to 107 MHz, the unit scans forward for radio stations, and assigns the strongest stations to presets 1 through 6.
3) If you switch to another memory band, say from FM1 to FM2, auto-scan again scans from 87 to 107 Mhz, and will program the exact same six stations it found for FM1 into the presets for FM2.
What if, due to the poor sensitivity mode of the tuner, there are not enough strong signals? The XDM will fail to program some of the presets, even if there are plenty of "weak" stations available. Did marketing demand this feature? Did someone in marketing implement this feature?
Once you want to get into the fancy functions, the learning curve (or rather, the difficulty curve) goes through the roof. By "fancy functions" I mean the XDM-6220's ability to play CDs filled with hundreds of compressed audio files (which I will call "data CDs" for brevity), to navigate through dozens of directories (folders), and to let you search for your music by inputting parts of the names of files and folders. To begin with, this receiver has three modes to navigate through data CDs:
1) By track number. When you insert your data CD, the receiver will scan through every folder and assign a number to each playable file (MP3 or WMA). The number can range between 001 and 999; all you have to do is to use the row of 10 buttons to punch in 3 digits in sequence, to get to the exact song you want. I suppose if you listen to your data CD enough times to self-induce madness, you could eventually manage to remember that song 384 is "I love you" and song 742 is "I hate you", etc. Not my favorite mode.
2) By name of file or folder. If you know exactly what song you want to play, and you did not self-induce madness in mode 1, chances are, you have included the song title in the name if its file. Chances are, the folder containing the song is named after the artist or the album title. If that is the case, you can use the row of 10 buttons to type in part of the name of the file or folder you want to go to. The buttons work similar to the way a telephone keypad can be used to type in letters: button 1 can be pressed repeatedly to cycle through the characters 'a', 'b', 'c' and '1', button 2 cycles through 'e', 'f', 'g' and '2', button 7 goes through "pqrs", or was it "tuv", or did I spend too much effort with mode 1 and am mad already?
If you do manage to type a few characters properly, the unit will search for all file and folder names containing the sequence of characters you entered, and let you step through a list of choices from which you can select the starting point of playback. It's a great feature... if you can memorize the keypad. Hey, we went down from memorizing 999 track numbers to just 10 keys mapping into 26 letters and 10 digits, all intertwined. Still not good enough? Read on.
3) By navigating through the folders and files of the CD file system. When you enter this mode, the display shows the name of the first entry in the root directory of your data CD, be it a file or a folder. You then press "folder down" or "folder up" to move to other directory entries. If you step onto a folder entry, you can enter the folder. You can keep going into nested sub-folders, or move upwards back to the parent folder. When you select a file, you can begin playback at that file, and the XDM-6220 will play that file and all the subsequent ones in the same folder. You don't have to memorize the order of the files and folders, and you don't even have to know (even a part of) the names of the files and folders.
Now would the reader like to guess which of the above modes is most useful, and which least useful? 3 and 1 respectively? Good answer. Question two: what should be the order of the search modes (aptly invoked by repeatedly pressing the "mode" button), so that you can access the most frequently used search mode easily? "3, 2 and 1" you say? Wrong answer. Turns out the modes are invoked in the order 1, 2 and 3; the most useful mode is the hardest one to get to. Why? Chalk this one along with "Do I really exist?"
[Conclusion and suitability]
The XDM-6220 is a very capable car receiver; it produces great sound, has amazing compatibility with CD media and various bitrates of MP3 and WMA files, and features a very useful line-in jack for external music players.
This unit is for people who:
1) Want the most bang for the buck (me, me, me!)
2) Want to be able to play anything from (almost) any audio source you could carry inside your car
3) Have no fear of a daunting user interface
The XDM-6220 is NOT for buyers who
1) Wish to get arrested for disturbing the peace, as its amplifier is just 15W (peak, not even continuous) * 4 channels
2) Listen to the radio a lot
3) Want the receiver to control external devices such as CD changers and specific digital music players
[Revision history]
2006 12 27: Written by and copyright Tow Wang 2006.
In-dash car stereo with CD player, AM/FM tuner; 50 watts peak power x 4 channels (200 watts total) Connect digital audio players via iPlug (3.5mm to R...More at Amazon
In-dash car stereo with CD player, AM/FM tuner; 50 watts peak power x 4 channels (200 watts total) Connect digital audio players via iPlug (3.5mm to R...More at Amazon Marketplace
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